Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Section II: The Lines of Karma
Appendix I. The Tangle of Karma
Obviously we must leave far behind us the current
theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit
by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice,
the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure
and deterrent dear to the surface human mind. There is here a more authentic and
spiritual truth at the base of Nature’s action and a far less mechanically
calculable movement. Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a
petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows
and lollipops, no unprofitable wheel of a brutal cosmic justice automatically
moved in the traces of man’s ignorant judgments and earthy desires and
instincts. Life and rebirth do not follow these artificial constructions, but a
movement spiritual and intimate to the deepest intention of Nature. A cosmic
Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and
experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own
luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law –
or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception,– the truth of Karma.
For what we understand by law is a single immutably
habitual movement or recurrence in Nature fruitful of a determined sequence of
things and that sequence must be clear, precise, limited to its formula,
invariable. If it is not that, if there is too much flexibility of movement, if
there intervenes too embarrassing a variety or criss-cross of action and
reaction, a too rich complex of forces, the narrow uncompromising incompetence
of our logical intelligence finds there not law but an incertitude and a chaos.
Our reason must be allowed to cut and hew and arbitrarily select its suitable
circumstances, isolate its immutable data,
skeletonise or mechanise life; otherwise it stands open-mouthed at a loss unable
to think with precision or act with effect in a field of subtle and indefinite
measures. It must be allowed to deal with mighty Nature as it deals with human
society, politics, ethics, conduct; for it can understand and do good work only
where it is licensed to build and map out its own artificial laws, erect a
clear, precise, rigid, infallible system and leave as little room as possible
for the endless flexibility and variety and complexity that presses from the
Infinite upon our mind and life. Moved by this need we endeavour to forge for
our own souls and for the cosmic Spirit even such a single and inflexible law of
Karma as we would ourselves have made, had the rule of the world been left to
us. Not this mysterious universe would we have made, but the pattern of a
rational cosmos fitted to our call for a simple definite guidance in action and
for a well-marked thumb rule facile and clear to our limited intelligence. But
this force we call Karma turns out to be no such precise and invariable
mechanism as we hoped; it is rather a thing of many planes that changes its face
and walk and very substance as it mounts from level to higher level, and on each
plane even it is not one movement but an indefinite complex of many spiral
movements hard enough for us to harmonise together or to find out whatever
secret harmony unknown to us and incalculable these complexities are weaving out
in this mighty field of the dealings of the soul with Nature.
Let us then call Karma no longer a Law, but rather the
many-sided dynamic truth of all action and life, the organic movement here of
the Infinite. That was what the ancient thinkers saw in it before it was cut and
shredded by lesser minds and turned into an easy and misleading popular formula.
Action of Karma follows and takes up many potential lines of the spirit into its
multitudinous surge, many waves and streams of combining and disputing
world-forces; it is the processus of the creative Infinite; it is the long and
multiform way of the progression of the individual and the cosmic soul in
Nature. Its complexities cannot be unravelled by our physical mind ever bound up
in the superficial appearance, nor by our vital mind of desire stumbling forward in the cloud of its own instincts and longings and rash
determinations through the maze of these myriad favouring and opposing forces
that surround and urge and drive and hamper us from the visible and invisible
worlds. Nor can it be perfectly classified, accounted for, tied up in bundles by
the precisions of our logical intelligence in its inveterate search for
clear-cut dogmas. On that day only shall we perfectly decipher what is now to us
Nature’s obscure hieroglyph of Karma when there rises in our enlarged
consciousness the supramental way of knowledge. The supramental eye can see a
hundred meeting and diverging motions in one glance and envelop in the largeness
of its harmonising vision of Truth all that to our minds is clash and opposition
and the collision and interlocked strife of numberless contending truths and
powers. Truth to the supramental sight is at once single and infinite and the
complexities of its play serve to bring out with an abundant ease the rich
significance of the Eternal’s many-sided oneness.
The complexity of the lines of Karma is much greater
than we have yet seen in the steps of thought that we have been obliged to cut
in order to climb to the summits where they converge. For the convenience of the
mind we have chosen to speak as if there were four quite separate planes each
with its separate lines of Karma,– the physical with its fixed law and very
easily perceptible return to our energies, the life plane, complex, full of
doubtful rewards and dangerous rebounds, rich promise and dark menace, the mind
plane with its high trenchant unattainable absolutes each in its separateness so
difficult to embody and all so hard to reconcile and combine and the supramental
where Nature’s absolutes are reached, her relativities ordered to their place
and all these lower movements delivered and harmonised because they have found
luminously their inner spiritual reason for existence. That division is not
false in itself, but its truth is subject to two capital provisos which at once
give them a complexity not apparent in the first formula. There are above and
behind our human existence the four levels but there each plane contains in
itself the others, although in each these others are subject to the dominant law of the plane,– life for instance obeys on the mental level the law of
mind and turns its movements into an instrumentation of the free intelligence.
Again man exists here in the body and the physical world; he is open more or
less to the vast movements of a life plane and the free movements of a mental
world that are far vaster and freer in their potentialities than anything that
we call here life and mind, but he does not live in that free mental light or in
that vast vital force. His business is to bring down and embody here as much of
that greater life and greater mind as can be precipitated into matter and
equipped with a form and organised in the physical formula. In proportion as he
ascends he does indeed rise above the physical and vital into the higher mental
lines of Karma, but he cannot leave them entirely behind him. The saint, the
intellectual man, scientist, thinker or creator, the seeker after beauty, the
seeker after any mental absolute is not that alone; he is also, even if less
exclusively than others, the vital and physical man; subject to the urgings of
the life and the body, he participates in the vital and physical motives of
Karma and receives the perplexed and intertwined return of these energies. It is
not intended in his birth that he shall live entirely in mind, for he is here to
deal with life and Matter as well and to bring as best he can a higher law into
life and Matter. And since he is not a mental being in a mental world, it is not
easy and in the end, we may suspect, not possible for him to impose entirely and
perfectly the law of the mental absolutes, a mental good, beauty, love, truth
and power on his lower parts. He has to take this other difficult truth into
account that life and Matter have absolutes of their own armed with an equal
right to formulation and persistence and he has to find some light, some truth,
some spiritual and supramental power that can take up these imperatives also no
less than the mind’s imperatives and harmonise all in a grand and integral
transformation. But the difficulty is again that if he is not open to the world
of free intelligence, he is still less open to the deeper and vaster spiritual
and supramental levels. There can indeed be great descents of spiritual light,
purity, power, love, delight into the earth consciousness in its human formula; but man as he is now can hold only a little of these things and he
can give them no adequate organisation and shape and body in his mental
movements or his life-action or his physical and material consciousness and
dynamis. The moment he tries to get at the absolute of the spirit, he feels
himself obliged to reject body, to silence mind, and to draw back from life. It
is that urgent necessity, that inability of mind and life and body to hold and
answer to the spirit that is the secret of asceticism, the philosophical
justification of the illusionist, the compulsion that moves the eremite and the
recluse. If on the other hand he tries to spiritualise mind and life and the
body he finds in the end that he has only brought down the spirit to a lower
formulation that cannot give all its truth and purity and power. He has to some
extent spiritualised mind, but much more has he mentalised the spiritual and to
mentalise the spiritual is to falsify and obscure it or at the very least to
dilute its truth, to imprison its force, to limit and alter its potentialities.
He has perhaps to a much less extent spiritualised his life, but much more has
he vitalised the spiritual and to vitalise the spiritual is to degrade it. He
has never yet spiritualised the body, at most he has minimised the physical by a
spiritual refusal and abstinence or brought down some mental and vital powers
mistaken for spiritual into his physical force and physical frame. More has not
been done in the human past so far as we can discover, or if anything greater
was done it was a transitory gain from the superconscient and has returned again
into our superconscience.
The secret reason of man’s failure to rise truly beyond
himself is a fundamental incapacity in the mind, the life and the body to
organise the highest integral truth and power of the spirit. And this incapacity
exists because mind and life and matter are in their nature depressed and
imperfect powers of the Infinite that need to be transformed into something
greater than themselves before they can escape from their depression and
imperfection; in their very nature they are a system of partial and separated
values and cannot adequately express or embody the integral and the one, a
movement of many divergent and mutually non-understanding or misunderstanding
lines they cannot arrive of themselves at any
but a provisional, limited and imperfect harmony and order. There is no doubt a
material Infinite, a vital Infinite, a mental Infinite in which we feel a
perfection, a delight, an essential harmony, an inexpressible completeness
which, when we experience it, makes us disregard the discords and imperfections
and obscurities we see and even perceive them as elements of the infinite
perfection. In other words the Spirit, the Infinite supports these depressed
values and elicits from them a certain joy of his manifestation that is complete
and illimitable enough in its own manner. But there is more behind and above,
there are greater more unmistakably harmonious values, greater truly perfect
powers of the Spirit than mind, life and matter and these wait for their
expression and only when they are expressed can we escape from this system of
harmony through discords and of a perfection on the whole that subsists by
imperfection in the detail. And as we open to a greater knowledge, we find that
even for such harmonies, stabilities, perfections as the energies of Mind, Life
and Matter can realise, they depend really not on their own delegated and
inferior power which is at best a more or less ignorant instrument but on a
greater deeper organising force and knowledge of which they are the inadequate
derivations. That force and knowledge is the self-possessed supramental power
and will and the perfect and untrammelled supramental gnosis of the Infinite. It
is that which has fixed the precise measures of Matter, regulates the motive
instincts and impulsions of Life, holds together the myriad seekings of Mind;
but none of these things are that power and gnosis and nothing therefore mental,
vital or physical is final or can even find its own integral truth and harmony
nor all these together their reconciliation until they are taken up and
transformed in a supramental manifestation. For this supermind or gnosis is the
entire organising will and knowledge of the spiritual, it is the Truth
Consciousness, the Truth Force, the organic instrumentation of divine Law, the
all-seeing eye of the divine Vision, the freely selecting and generating harmony
of the eternal Ananda.
data,
skeletonise or mechanise life; otherwise it stands open-mouthed at a loss unable
to think with precision or act with effect in a field of subtle and indefinite
measures. It must be allowed to deal with mighty Nature as it deals with human
society, politics, ethics, conduct; for it can understand and do good work only
where it is licensed to build and map out its own artificial laws, erect a
clear, precise, rigid, infallible system and leave as little room as possible
for the endless flexibility and variety and complexity that presses from the
Infinite upon our mind and life. Moved by this need we endeavour to forge for
our own souls and for the cosmic Spirit even such a single and inflexible law of
Karma as we would ourselves have made, had the rule of the world been left to
us. Not this mysterious universe would we have made, but the pattern of a
rational cosmos fitted to our call for a simple definite guidance in action and
for a well-marked thumb rule facile and clear to our limited intelligence. But
this force we call Karma turns out to be no such precise and invariable
mechanism as we hoped; it is rather a thing of many planes that changes its face
and walk and very substance as it mounts from level to higher level, and on each
plane even it is not one movement but an indefinite complex of many spiral
movements hard enough for us to harmonise together or to find out whatever
secret harmony unknown to us and incalculable these complexities are weaving out
in this mighty field of the dealings of the soul with Nature.
