SRI AUROBINDO

ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA

SHORTER WORKS — 1910-1950

Chapter XXIX. Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance: Argument¹

Memory is believed by some schools to be the constituent of our continuous personality; but memory is only a mechanism, a device, a substitute for direct consciousness. The mind is directly conscious of existence in the present, holds existence in the past by its substitute memory, infers its future existence from this direct present self-consciousness and the memory of its continuity in the past. – This sense of self-conscious existence it extends into the idea of eternity, but the only eternity the mind really seizes is a continuous succession of moments of being in eternal Time; of this eternity it possesses only the present moment, a limited portion of the past held fragmentarily and nothing at all of the future, while it is unable to know any timeless eternity of conscious being, any real eternal Self. Therefore the nature of our Mind is an Ignorance seizing at knowledge by successive action in the moments of Time. – If mind is all, then we must remain for ever in this Ignorance which is not absolute nescience, but an ineffectual and fragmentary seizing at knowledge. But there are really two powers of our conscious being, Ignorance of the mind, Knowledge beyond mind, simultaneously existing, either separately in an eternal dualism or, as is really the fact, as superior and inferior, sovereign and dependent states of the same consciousness, by which the Knower sees his timeless being and the action of Time in that self through the Knowledge while he sees himself in Time and travelling in the succession of its moments by the Ignorance. For this reason the Upanishad declares that Brahman can really be known only by knowing him as both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and so only can one arrive at the status of immortality. – Ignorance is therefore the consciousness of being in the succession of Time, and it is so called because, actually self-divided by the moments of Time, the field of space and the forms of the multiplicity, it cannot know either eternal Being or the World, either the transcendent or the universal reality. Its knowledge is partly true, partly false, because it ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon. – It is through self-consciousness that the mind can arrive most readily at the eternal Reality; the rest of its means of knowledge are, like memory, devices and substitutes for direct consciousness. It is easy therefore to regard the knowledge of the self within as real and the rest as not-self and illusion. But the distinction is illusory and self-absorption in the stable self within is only one state of consciousness like self-dispersion in thought and memory and will. The real self is the Eternal who is capable simultaneously of the mobility in Time and the immobility basing Time. All object of knowledge is that real and eternal self whether seen in essence and stability or in phenomenon and instability of Time. – The Ignorance is a means by which it is rendered into values of knowledge and action, Time being a sort of bank on which we draw for valuation and action in the present, with a realised store in the account of the past and an unrealised infinite deposit to be taken from the future so as to be made valuable for Time-experience and valid for Time-activity. But, behind, all is known and ready for use according to the will of the Self in its dealings with Time and Space and Causality.

Arya. 02.1916 / 04.1917

¹ Chapter XXIX of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was revised in 1939-40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter VIII.

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