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Mind, Origin of Separative Consciousness THE world is one, indissolubly and solidly one:
no part can be separated from any other. Any action anywhere affects the whole
and nothing can be moved even by a hair's breadth without changing the entire
balance. Each element literally lives, moves and has its being in every other
and the totality is a rigidly unified mass. If
it is so, then there arises a difficulty, a dilemma. For the world to progress
at all, under the circumstances, it must progress as a whole, en masse; it
cannot progress piecemeal. The totality must advance in order that each element
may progress and each element must advance so that the totality may progress.
Perhaps this is what is happening actually in the world: but the result, if
nothing else, has been rather slow. It will take not only millenniums but aeons
for humanity to make any progress worth the name. It
need not be so however. Man is solidly one with the universe, true; but he has
a faculty in him by which he can separate, isolate himself from the rest of the
world. It is the mind's power of self-division and dissociation Through this
actually man can put the world aside and outside himself (for a time, at least),
cut away from it and concentrate upon his own being, his inner truth, in other
words, make the progress in himself, as quickly as possible, independently,
without waiting for others or the world to progress in any degree. And then
when once he has made the progress himself, achieved a new higher status, he
can turn back upon the world and bring to bear up on it the force of his
progress and establish the progress more generally.
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power which in the inferior human consciousness appears as mind or mental discernment
is the image or delegate here below of that very force of consciousness that
originally separated the world from the Divine, created the ego and placed it
as an objective reality against itself. It was a force of dividing
consciousness, of exclusive concentration, that created the fission in the
original unitary status of the Divine: it was that that precipitated the world
of negation, of ignorance and inconscience out of the supreme Light and
Reality. It
was a power of denial that severed the world from its pure source: the same
power can now be utilised for the return back for the reintegration. The power
that separated from the Divine is capable of separating from the world; the consciousness
that moved away from the One Divine can move away also from the Multiple
Ignorance. As the individualised element isolated itself from the unitary consciousness
of the Divine, in the same way the individualised element in man can stand
aloof from the unitary being of the world: as it came down the ladder of
consciousness from the supreme light of the spirit into the lowest depth of
unconscious dead matter, the same path it can take in the opposite way and from
the unconsciousness rise into the fullness of the original light. The soul has
freely chosen the bondage, he is free too to choose
his freedom again. That is what the Upanishad meant when it said: avidyaya
mrtuym tirtwa, by the Ignorance he shall cross death.
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