Part 20 (2/2)
Once you really appropriate this truth, and a.s.similate it in the depths of your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine) will take place within you. The whole world will be transformed, and every thought and act of which you are capable will take on a different color and complexion. Indeed the revolution will be so vast that it would be quite impossible for me within the limits of this discourse to describe it.
I will, however, occupy the rest of my time in dealing with some points and conclusions, and some mental changes which will flow perfectly naturally from this axiomatic change taking place at the very root of life.
”Free from qualities.” We generally pride ourselves a little on our qualities. Some of us think a great deal of our good qualities, and some of us are rather ashamed of our bad ones! I would say: ”Do not trouble very much about all that. What good qualities you have--well you may be quite sure they do not really amount to much; and what bad qualities, you may be sure they are not very important! Do not make too much fuss about either. Do you see? The thing is that you, you yourself, are not ANY of your qualities--you are the being that perceives them. The thing to see to is that they should not confuse you, bamboozle you, and hide you from the knowledge of yourself--that they should not be erected into a screen, to hide you from others, or the others from you. If you cease from running after qualities, then after a little time your soul will become purified, and you will KNOW that your self is the Self of all creatures; and when you can feel that you will know that the other things do not much matter.
Sometimes people are so awfully good that their very goodness hides them from other people. They really cannot be on a level with others, and they feel that the others are far below them. Consequently their 'selves' are blinded or hidden by their 'goodness.' It is a sad end to come to! And sometimes it happens that very 'bad' people--just because they are so bad--do not erect any screens or veils between themselves and others. Indeed they are only too glad if others will recognize them, or if they may be allowed to recognize others. And so, after all, they come nearer the truth than the very good people.
”The Self is free from qualities.” That thing which is so deep, which belongs to all, it either--as I have already said--has ALL qualities, or it has none. You, to whom I am speaking now, your qualities, good and bad, are all mine. I am perfectly willing to accept them. They are all right enough and in place--if one can only find the places for them. But I know that in most cases they have got so confused and mixed up that they cause great conflict and pain in the souls that harbor them. If you attain to knowing yourself to be other than and separate from the qualities, then you will pa.s.s below and beyond them all. You will be able to accept ALL your qualities and harmonize them, and your soul will be at peace. You will be free from the domination of qualities then because you will know that among all the mult.i.tudes of them there are none of any importance!
If you should happen some day to reach that state of mind in connection with which this revelation comes, then you will find the experience a most extraordinary one. You will become conscious that there is no barrier in your path; that the way is open in all directions; that all men and women belong to you, are part of you. You will feel that there is a great open immense world around, which you had never suspected before, which belongs to you, and the riches of which are all yours, waiting for you. It may, of course, take centuries and thousands of years to realize this thoroughly, but there it is. You are just at the threshold, peeping in at the door. What did Shakespeare say? ”To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou can'st not then be false to any man.” What a profound bit of philosophy in three lines! I doubt if anywhere the basis of all human life has been expressed more perfectly and tersely.
One of the Upanishads (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says: ”The happiness belonging to a mind, which through deep inwardness (1) (or understanding) has been washed clean and has entered into the Self, is a thing beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be perceived by an inner faculty.” Observe the conviction, the intensity with which this joy, this happiness is described, which comes to those whose minds have been washed clean (from all the silly trumpery sediment of self-thought) and have become transparent, so that the great universal Being residing there in the depths can be perceived. What sorrow indeed, what, grief, can come to such an one who has seen this vision? It is truly a thing beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be PERCEIVED--and that by an inner faculty. The external apparatus of thought is of no use. Argument is of no use. But experience and direct perception are possible; and probably all the experiences of life and of mankind through the ages are gradually deepening our powers of perception to that point where the vision will at last rise upon the inward eye.
(1) The word in the Max Muller translation is ”meditation.” But that is, I think, a somewhat misleading word. It suggests to most people the turning inward of the THINKING faculty to grope and delve in the interior of the mind. This is just what should NOT be done. Meditation in the proper sense should mean the inward deepening of FEELING and consciousness till the region of the universal self is reached; but THOUGHT should not interfere there. That should be turned on outward things to mould them into expression of the inner consciousness.
Another text, from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (which I have already quoted in the paper on ”Rest”), says: ”If a man wors.h.i.+p the Self only as his true state, his work cannot fail, for whatever he desires, that he obtains from the Self.” Is that not magnificent? If you truly realize your ident.i.ty and union with the great Self who inspires and informs the world, then obviously whatever you desire the great Self win desire, and the whole world will conspire to bring it to you. ”He maketh the winds his angels, and the flaming fires his ministers.” (I need not say that I am not asking you to try and identify yourself with the great Self universal IN ORDER to get riches, ”opulence,” and other things of that kind which you desire; because in that quest you will probably not succeed. The Great Self is not such a fool as to be taken in in that way. It may be true--and it is true--that if ye seek FIRST the Kingdom of Heaven all these things shall be added unto you; but you must seek it first, not second.)
Here is a pa.s.sage from Towards Democracy: ”As s.p.a.ce spreads everywhere, and all things move and change within it, but it moves not nor changes,
”So I am the s.p.a.ce within the soul, of which the s.p.a.ce without is but the similitude and mental image;
”Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all life--death shall no longer divide thee from whom thou lovest.
”I am the Sun that s.h.i.+nes upon all creatures from within--gazest thou upon me, thou shalt be filled with joy eternal.”
Yes, this great sun is there, always s.h.i.+ning, but most of the time it is hidden from us by the clouds of which I have spoken, and we fail to see it. We complain of being out in the cold; and in the cold, for the time being, no doubt we are; but our return to the warmth and the light has now become possible.
Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self--disclosed at first in darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe--FINDS ITS TRUE IDENt.i.tY. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what it is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the sense of separation and alienation--alienation from other people, and persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it is pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable.
The hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds at last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.
We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works by a ”law of cussedness”--so that, whichever way we want to go, that way seems always barred, and we only b.u.mp against blind walls without making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from ourselves. Once we have pa.s.sed a certain barrier, which at present looks so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we have pa.s.sed it--once we have found the open secret of ident.i.ty--then the way is indeed open in every direction.
The world in which we live--the world into which we are tumbled as children at the first onset of self-consciousness--denies this great fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation rules. Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary principle (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one recognized--and to such an extent that always there prevails the obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You go into the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you find that the principle which denies unity is the one that prevails.
The criminal (whose actions have really been determined by the society around him) is cast out, disacknowledged, and condemned to further isolation in a prison cell. 'Property' again is the principle which rules and determines our modern civilization--namely that which is proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the others.
In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come about that during all this civilization-period the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such an extraordinary degree. Society has been built on a false base, not true to fact or life--and has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its falseness. Meanwhile at the heart of it all--and within all the frantic external strife and warfare--there is all the time this real great life brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still within.
The word Democracy indicates something of the kind--the rule of the Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of that will transform, not only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and other inst.i.tutions, into something really great and glorious instead of the dismal ma.s.ses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will transform our sense of Morality.
Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness--one of the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has ever infested the human brain. If any one should follow and a.s.similate what I have just said about the true nature of the Self he will realize that it will never again be possible for him to congratulate himself on his own goodness or morality or superiority; for the moment he does so he will separate himself from the universal life, and proclaim the sin of his own separation. I agree that this conclusion is for some people a most sad and disheartening one--but it cannot be helped! A man may truly be 'good' and 'moral' in some real sense; but only on the condition that he is not aware of it. He can only BE good when not thinking about the matter; to be conscious of one's own goodness is already to have fallen!
We began by thinking of the self as just a little local self; then we extended it to the family, the cause, the nation--ever to a larger and vaster being. At last there comes a time when we recognize--or see that we SHALL have to recognize--an inner Equality between ourselves and all others; not of course an external equality--for that would be absurd and impossible--but an inner and profound and universal Equality. And so we come again to the mystic root-conception of Democracy.
And now it will be said: ”But after all this talk you have not defined the Self, or given us any intellectual outline of what you mean by the word.” No--and I do not intend to. If I could, by any sort of copybook definition, describe and show the boundaries of myself, I should obviously lose all interest in the subject. Nothing more dull could be imagined. I may be able to define and describe fairly exhaustively this inkpot on the table; but for you or for me to give the limits and boundaries of ourselves is, I am glad to say, impossible. That does not, however, mean that we cannot FEEL and be CONSCIOUS of ourselves, and of our relations to other selves, and to the great Whole. On the contrary I think it is clear that the more vividly we feel our organic unity with the whole, the less shall we be able to separate off the local self and enclose it within any definition. I take it that we can and do become ever more vividly conscious of our true Self, but that the mental statement of it always does and probably always will lie beyond us.
All life and all our action and experience consist in the gradual manifestation of that which is within us--of our inner being. In that sense--and reading its handwriting on the outer world--we come to know the soul's true nature more and more intimately; we enter into the mind of that great artist who beholds himself in his own creation.
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