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The Personal and the Impersonal As you go
up in your consciousness towards the origin of things you come finally at the
end of things: you are beyond the names and forms that make up the universe,
beyond even the subtle names and forms at the topmost. You arrive at something
formless, impersonal,' unthinkable, unique, infinite and eternal. It is at best
a vast force or a state of consciousness. When you come in contact with it, you
lose your personal form, your separate individuality and become the featureless
absolute. Many religions and philosophies consider this status to be the
supreme, the highest and the origin of things. In reality, however, it is not
the end of things nor the supreme status. You can rise
further beyond. Your consciousness enters into the formless and impersonal and
merges its separate existence there and then emerges again; it envisages a
reality which is not formless but has a form, it is not impersonality but a
Person, with which or with whom you can have a personal relation unlike the
relation or lack of relation with the Impersonal. But this form beyond the
formless is not like the forms of the inferior consciousness: it is the Form of
forms. And it is not a person like a human being or even a divine being or god,
but an essential Personality, the Person of persons. It has not the limitation
or exclusiveness of ego-bounded individuality (even the gods are ego-bounded);
it has a kind of fluid boundedness
or outline which is recognizable as that of a definite Person, but it has not
the fixity or rigidity of lower forms. And
yet to arrive at this supreme Person, to come in contact with Him, it is
necessary to pass through and have the experience of the formless impersonal
infinity. For that breaks the inferior moulds, the narrow egoistic formations
which are
Page – 264 only aberrations or obscure images of the true Person. Somewhat
on the same line the vital too has to proceed to transform itself.
It must get rid of its ignorant and violent impulses, its obscure formations:
it must be thoroughly cleansed and purified. For that it must learn to be quiet
and silent – absolutely still and passive; and in that quiet passivity to feel,
to be conscious of the Divine Presence, to be saturated with it. When once that
is done, it is called upon to come out and take part in active life. Normally,
however, the tendency is, when one has withdrawn and lived an inward quieted
life, on coming back to outer life, to turn to the old accustomed ways and
reactions; one falls back into the old groove of the consciousness. The vital
should then make the experience and the realisation of the Divine Presence
dynamic so that it may be a living reality; the vital must be conscious of it
in the midst of all activities, not merely in the indrawn state. The energy of
the vital must be put out into a complete and perfected living, but it must not
run into old moulds and take up the habitual modes; with the constant sense of
the Divine, the ever present truth and beauty of the Divine's consciousness,
the vital will possess a new life and create a new pattern of living.
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