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Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable
GOD is not an autocrat – a despot like the Czar or the Shahan Shah, pedestalled high above and ruling over his subject-slaves according to his fancy and caprice, issuing ukases and firmans which suffer no delay or hindrance in their execution. God is, if he is at all to be compared to a king, more like a constitutional sovereign. He does not act as he chooses and pleases. There is a system, a plan, a procedure of governance; there are principles and laws and rules, and he abides by them. There are even agents and intermediaries, officers and servants – instruments through whom he works out his purpose. He is] the supreme dharmaraja, the lord and guardian of the Law. Not that he is pound by his constitution, in the sense that he is a slave to it and cannot alter it, even when he finds it necessary to do so, but that once the rules of the game have been laid, he agrees to follow them so long as he plays the particular game.
The Divine does not announce his presence or advent by miracles, by sudden catastrophes and upheavals. The power, the knowledge or the love that belongs to him is just like the air that surrounds us, whose silent and tranquil, yet constant pressure energises the heart of living things, whose very translucency is the stuff out of which is fashioned Earth's richly variegated life. The Divine does not compel, he persuades. The individual. soul is born out of the Divine and forms a part and parcel of ; the Divine, but it has been given freedom –freedom to live Page – 170 and move as it chooses. And although the Divine Will in the cosmos acts as a continuous pressure in the form of the evolutionary urge pushing inferior Nature gradually towards an unfolding of the Divine's own Consciousness and Nature, inherent in it and overarching it, yet it is a force that lies in the background and its fulfilment is only eventual. There is a long interim period of a full five-act drama in which the soul, through gathering experiences, freely moves and explores and seeks, falters and errs, and finally comes to its own; it comes to realise that the freedom it had, even the freedom to descend and enter into the region of the Ignorance, was accorded to it for the play of self-choice, for the joy of self-discovery, for the delight of self-surrender and self-fulfilment.
The Divine has two aspects in its manifestation, the one in which it is the All, the infinite and equal Brahman, spread wide as to include the two extremes, Knowledge and Ignorance, Birth and Death, impartially containing or consisting of the dualities – it is the Reality that is; the other is the reality that becomes – it is not the All, but the Over-All, the Transcendent that manifests and is being embodied; it is not the duality of Knowledge and Ignorance, but Supra-knowledge; it is not the duality of Birth and Death, but Immortality; it is the Divine in its own Truth-Nature that lies on one side beyond and behind, at the origin, and on the other, involved and submerged in the play of the All and gradually emerging out of the All, transforming it and giving it a concrete form even in the likeness of the original transcendent supra-Nature. Both the Divines are to be envisaged and established in one single undivided realisation – the static and equal and impartial Brahman forming the basis, the unshakable calm and absolute freedom, and the dynamic emergent Brahman revealing more and more in the manifested creation a definite divine Purpose and Aim and Fulfilment, The one accepts and contains everything, for it is everything; the other, on the basis of that wide acceptation, chooses and selects, keeps back or dissolves and annihilates, in the progression of its increasing light, Page – 171 the darkness, the ignorance that form one part of the dual Nature.
The actual manifestation, the world as it stands, is in the hands of the Undivine. The Divine has to establish his reign through a working out of struggling and combating forces. The evil that man does or suffers from comes from his slavery to the Undivine: likewise the good that he is capable of doing or receiving is the sign of his freedom from that slavery and of his openness to the secret Divine. The Undivine means the obscure separativeness of the Ignorance, the darkness of Inferior Nature. The Divine, from his superior status, has cast himself down and is scattered and concretised as the ignorant creation, he has consented to be degraded and imbedded into Matter, in order to quicken Matter gradually, to illumine and transform it and invest it with the Divine's own glory. The whole dynamics of creation consists in the interaction of these two forces, one apparent and pragmatic and patent, the other behind and involved and latent. The elements and forces of the Ignorance, while they appear to move in the cycles of their inexorable Law, are gradually led by the stress of the involved Spirit, to evolve and change, and finally express and incarnate that which it now negates, that which is the Spirit unveiled in its pristine authenticity. A day will come when it is the Divine that will reign upon earth, the Divine in his transcendent Delight and Knowledge and Power and Purity, and human life shall embody the Law of the Truth. The thing may not happen today or within a short period, according to the human standard. Man's smallness, in its impatience, once could not contemplate a span of more than a few thousand years. But we have been forced to learn to calculate earth's life and evolution in astronomical figures, and the human stage is being found to have extended farther and farther into a dim and immemorial past. Millenniums are nothing in the march of the cosmic play. Things are done here in the measures of eternity; it is only the narrowness of the Page – 172 human consciousness that wants to cut up what is eternal and infinite into convenient bits and parcels. The Day will come towards which the whole creation has been moving since the beginning of time, it will come inevitably in due course – it may be today or tomorrow, it may be a decade hence, or it may even be a century or a millennium hence; it will come all the same. Page – 173
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