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The Sorrows of God THE Son of Man – the Avatar – suffers with and suffers for the suffering humanity. The Christ with his cross, Ramakrishna with his cancer, Socrates with the hemlock creeping up and benumbing his limbs and Mohammed being hunted from place to place are familiar and poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head." And this is bound to be so, for it is the inexorable law of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body and soul of all beings and creatures, made of the same stuff and substance cannot – and wants not to escape the general fate whatever it is. If misery be the badge of the human tribe, the Divine Man, the representative human being must wear that badge. And yet there is a difference. In the case of the Divine Man it is a willing acceptance not an imposition or blind sub mission. Indeed, it is this difference that makes the unity of creation a progressive unity, instead of a static unity, a never-ending repetition, an eternal recurrence. There is a consciousness above and a consciousness below: a consciousness above the ignorant nature and a consciousness within that nature. They are not, however, altogether distinct and incommensurable: it is the same consciousness with a double status as in the well-known figure of the two birds in in the Upanishad. The
Upanishadic standpoint declares that the being above is a silent witness,
inactive, immobile, still. The one below is active and tastes of things both
bitter and sweet, in other
Page – 379 words, it takes part and is involved in the varied life-experiences. Certain lines of spiritual experience find that the being above is the reality, that the other is only an image, a reflection or illusion; and the image looks like a troubled image because it is, as it were, a reflection in the troubled waters of cosmic ignorance: dispel the ignorance, nothing remains but the transcendent Witness-Being, all alone. Such is the position of mayavada or illusionism. But there are other lines of experience giving a different view and a different realisation. Both the transcendent and the immanent are form of the same Reality, with different functions, standing on different levels. Thus, as we say, the one below is not a vain image, or a mere reflection, but a descent here in the manifestation, of the reality above. This is also as real as that, the other, only it functions differently. The descent means two things, a double operation, first, the assumption of ignorance: what was light becomes obscurity, what was vast and infinite becomes small and finite, what was straight becomes crooked, what was delight becomes pain, what was one and united becomes many and disparate, what was whole becomes fragmentary. The descending being in one part or facet turns into the exact opposite of what it was originally, it is a denial of itself; secondly, in another aspect or part of itself, in its essence and profundity, it remains unaltered, intact as it were with no change whatsoever in its nature and character. That is the immanent Godhead, the emanation, the extension or projection of the transcendent into the external material appearance. This immanent Godhead has its own function, it is the initiation of the ascent after the descent, in the vast field of an apparent total ignorance it is as it were the catalytic element introducing a reverse movement upward. Left to
itself, Nature, the inferior inconscient Nature would admit of no change, it
would only repeat the past; it would be a circular or cyclic movement, at the
most it would move in a horizontal line; no upward movement would be possible.
It is only when the consciousness descends, sends a shaft of light into the
dark inert mass below, uses it as a churning rod, that there occurs the
stirring of a new creation; a new formation begins, a new content is added and
a new disposition built up. To the human consciousness that appears as
calamities
Page – 380 and catastrophes. It is truly the great sacrificial horse in the Upanishadic image that shakes its limbs and the elements roar and thunder – the forward-marching galloping fiery force of a progressing Consciousness. At the very outset the light descends as a shower of scattered glowing points into the heart of things, secreted and unobserved; that gives only just a basis for the progressive upward movement. It initiates a mere possibility. For a more effective power, for the dynamic upward drive other descents are necessary, descents of individual formations, individualities and personalities embodying the light and force of conscious ness. This becomes tangible when the light enters into the human creation. All men, all human formations are individualised specks of light cast into a material shape. And this shape bears all the stigma of inconscient nature. But it is the work and mission of the secret immanent light to corrode into the dense dark material and illumine and new create it. The whole suffering humanity presents the picture of a laboratory where a new laser beam is operating for the realisation of a renovated humanity. Great souls, Avatars, are a necessity, an inevitability in the process of evolution and ascension, for they are individualisations, impersonations so to say, in whom the consciousness energy is massively stored and concretised for a greater and radical effective power of realisation. Inevitably this means as I have said the assumption of all the ills of nature; for the very purpose of incarnation is to purify the external nature, so that it becomes one with the inner being. So, all terrestrial human beings share in the impurity of the ignorant ordinary nature and share also, as secretly conscious entities although outwardly almost absolutely unconscious, in the general work of progress and purification. But there are beings who come forward as conscious formations with the mission of uplifting, transmuting, divinising humanity. The
higher or deeper the source of the descending or manifesting Consciousness – for
there are gradations or various statuses of it – the wider and vaster and more
radical is its effective power for redeeming and changing the ignorant common
nature, and also strangely, perhaps inevitably, the more intimate and poignant
its participation in the travail of
Page – 381 that nature – the
participation extends not only to pain and suffering but to death also, for
through death the path leads to resurrection and immortality. The Divine
Himself in various forms comes down upon and into earth and pays by his pain
and suffering for the sins and errors of humanity. That is the ransom he
condescends to offer to the deity of ignorance, the reigning lord of the world
for securing the freedom of man's soul. The divine emanations bear the burden
of ignorance all the more so that the burden on others may be lightened, the
pains less painful. Indeed, suffering humanity is also the suffering Godhead
himself, suffering multifariously although ignorantly and unconsciously. There
is an inner working of the secret godhead in order that the suffering may be
gradually transmuted into something else, into the divine delight. The Godhead
has taken up this task in order that the Divine may not remain Divine only in
its essence and in the other, the transcendent status, but express itself also
as the Divine in an earthly form, an earthly form cleared of all dross, made luminously
beautiful.
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