THE TEACHING OF SRI AUROBINDO (Inst 2/28th Aug, ‘13) CHAPTER ONE – PHILOSOPHY PART 1 Every thinking person asks himself, in his awakened moments: what is the meaning of this life? Or, has it any meaning at all? What is this world? How has it come to be? Where is it drifting to? And what is the significance of his present? Many have thought over these questions before and the answers they have given are varied and often contradictory. The universe, it is said, is a creation of an Almighty God who has brought all creatures into being by a fiat and rules over them with the scales of justice in his hands. He rewards the good with happiness and punishes the evil with misery. All continues till, one day, he is pleased to dissolve the empire. There are others who pronounce there is no God. God is only a figment of the anthropomorphic imagination of man. The world is self-existent. All is a result of the action and reaction of the elements and forces; each form comes into existence and passes out of it mechanically as a result of certain combinations and break up of material elements. Consciousness is only an epiphenomenon of the physical organism. There is neither past nor future; only the present is real and it is wisdom to make the most of it. No, this world is not real either, say still others. The world is a transient phenomenon where everything changes moment to moment, man a stream of thought-movements and bundle of impressions: the whole concatenation is kept going by the never ending urge of Desire. Once this prop is withdrawn the flux of things lapses and ceases to be. There is no abiding reality as such; the only thing that truly exists is a Nothing, Zero, Shunyam. There is yet another view which has exercised a profound influence on the mind of man. According to it there is a Supreme Reality; but it is Absolute Indefinable, One without-a-second – the Brahman, which stands transcendent above all creation. That alone is real; all else is unreal. The universe is a huge shadow cast by the Being of Brahman or a fantasm woven by Its own force of being or Maya. Thus the world phenomena, the creatures peopling it, are all shadow figures flitting about on an illusory stage. The sooner each one sees this truth, or the lack of truth in his life and withdraws from it to the Sole Truth Beyond, the better. There are certain modified versions of this standpoint which lend a partial reality to the world and life, but all told, the utmost they concede is an inferior value to world-existence vis-a-vis Truer Beyond. Less or more, there is always a sense of unreality, an impermanence overhanging this life. One has to recognize that it is an activity of an inferior if not a wholly unreal kind and it is best to effect one’s release from this state of dissolvable turmoil and pass to a hereafter or Beyond which alone is ultimately True and Permanent. To Sri Aurobindo, however, the world is not a delusion or a baseless transient phenomenon. All is real; you are real, I am real, every bit that we see around is as real as Reality could be. For all is a true formation of Brahman that is the Sole Reality: O Brahman, Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; Old and worn thou walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed, Svetsvtara Upanishad, IV. 3, 4
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:29:55 +0000
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