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The Eternal East and West
THE East and the West are two recognised wings of humanity. Only the relation between them is somewhat in dispute. According to one view the two are quite separate and irreconcilable entities, because they .embody two outlooks that are contradictory to each other. The other view is that they are not contradictory, however distinct they may be; they are complementary or supplementary to each other. The interaction between the two across the centuries recorded in history has been admitted and studied; it considerably influenced the growth and development of each in its line. Only the influence exerted some view with favour, others with disfavour. For some consider the mixture of influence, like that of blood, as a necessary condition of progress and creativity: others again are keen on maintaining the purity of stock, the particular type of culture to which each is attached and any intrusion of a foreign vein they consider as a lowering, a degeneration of the type. We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has been pointed out and accepted generally as true is that of the spiritual East and the worldly or materialist West. Crudely and categorically formulated the truth remains no longer true. There is a very large amount of worldliness in the East, on the one hand, and on the other, mystics and spiritual seekers or leaders are not a rare phenomenon in the West. However, it can be said and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates Page 166 and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented, organised, almost consummated there in a supreme manner. Even as the science of Matter has reached its apotheosis in the West. Recognising the difference, the momentous question confronting us is what should be our next move: must we accept the one and reject the other for the sake of human progress and fulfilment, or that a harmony and synthesis is possible and is demanded ? For it is not unoften asserted that the so-called spiritual outlook of the East is only a mediaeval outlook. All people in the world, including even the West, were once upon a time predominantly religious and spiritual; that was a certain stage in man's evolution. Europe has passed that stage of myth and imagination, has brought upon the earth and is living the higher illumination that Science reveals. The East did not or could not march with Time and continues the old world with its backward glance; it stands arrested in its growth. This view finds its justification because of a particular out-look on spirituality and non-spirituality. If the Spirit and things spiritual are taken to mean something transcending and rejecting the world and the things of the world, something exclusive of life and its fulfilment here on earth, if on the other hand, the world and its life are given only their face value emptying them of their deeper and transcendent contents—in the manner of the great Laplace who could find no place for God in his map of the world which seemed to be quite complete in itself, if this trenchant division is made in the very definition of the terms, in our primary axioms and postulates, then, of course, we cannot avoid a scission and an eternal struggle. If you consider the Spirit as only pure spirit, an absolute without any relation, as an ever-fixed and static entity and if we view Matter as purely material and the law of mechanics as supreme and inviolable, then there cannot be a reconciliation or even a meeting between the two. There are some who have a great goodwill, who wish to avoid clash and quarrel and are for concord and harmony. They have tried the reconciliation, but failed. The two positions being fundamentally Page 167 exclusive of each other can, at best, be juxtaposed, but not unified or fused together. And yet mankind has always sought for an integral, an all- comprehending fulfilment, a truth and a realisation that would go round his entire existence. Man has always aspired, in the midst of the transience and imperfection that the world is, for something stable and perfect, in the heart of disharmony for some core of perfect harmony. He termed it God, Atman, Summum Bonum and he sought it sometimes, as he thought necessary, even at the cost of the world and the life, if it is to be found elsewhere. Man aspired also always to find this habitation of his made somewhat better. Dissatisfied with his present state, he sought to mould it, remake it, put into it something which his aspiration and inspiration called the True, the Beautiful, the Good. There was always this double aspiration in man, one of ascent and the other of descent, one vertical and the other horizontal, one leading up and beyond—totally beyond, in its extreme urge—the other probing into the mystery locked up there below, releasing the power to reform or recreate the world, although he was not always sure whether it was a power of mind or of matter. This double aspiration has found its expression and symbol in the East and the West, each concentrating on one line, sometimes even to the neglect or denial of the other. But this division or incompatibility need not be there and must not be there. A new conception of the Spirit and 'a new conception of Matter are gaining ground more and more, moving towards a true synthesis of the two, making for the creation of a new world and a new human type. The East is no longer the traditional East of the poet who viewed it as eternally static and meditative, drowned in an "eyeless muse" away and aloof from earth and world. Even if it had and has still in its essential nature a nostalgia for the transcendence, yet it seeks today more and more for a hold upon the physical realities: it seems to remember again what the Upanishadic Rishi sought—the Rishi being asked whether he came for the mundane wealth of a thousand heads of cattle, with golden rings round their horns, or for the knowledge of the Transcendent Reality, replied that he had come for both. And the hidebound materialist West, the positivist scientific Page 168 West, finds this day many fissures and loopholes in the solid Laplacian scheme; as it dives down and enters into the secrecies of even the most material things, curious mysteries surge up and its eyes demand another look and another vision than those to which the mere senses have accustomed them. Physical Scientists bending towards or being compelled to bend towards metaphysics and even mysticism are no longer an anomaly in the scientific world. The Spirit is not the static transcendent absolute entity only. It is dynamic Force, creative conscious Energy. The spiritual is not mere silence and status, it is expression and movement also. Any silence and any status are not the silence and the status of the Spirit—the silence and status of death, for example; so too any expression and movement are not of the Spirit either—but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic being—a somewhat aggrandised human being— treating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally. Again, at the other end. Matter is not mere dead mechanical matter. It is vibrant energy, but energy that conceals within it life and consciousness. Besides, the whirl and motion of energies is not all, something inherently static looms large behind: you call it ether, field, space or substratum—it is being, one would like to say, infused with a secret consciousness and will. We say then, symbolically at least, if not literally, that the West is looking to the East for this revelation towards which it is groping or moving in its own way: the secret spirit-consciousness that is alive in and through the material cosmos, that alone gives its total sense and significance. And the secret spirit must embody itself here below in material life, the status must be made supremely dynamic—the transcendent consciousness, even while maintaining its transcendence, has to deploy its immanence in things of the earth and earthly existence. That is what the West brings to the East; that is what the Scientific and materialist look and labour offer to be integrated into the aspiration and realisation of the East. So then we say that the East starts from the summit and Page 169 Surveys reality from above downwards, while the West starts from below and works upward. The two complementary movements can be described in several other graphic terms. Instead of a movement from the summit to the base and of another from the base to the apex, that is to say, a movement of ascent and of descent, we can speak of a movement from within outward and of that from outside inward, that is to say, from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre; we can speak also of a movement of contraction, withdrawal or concentration and a movement of expansion and expression and diffusion. Again, we can refer to a vertical movement and a horizontal movement. All however express the same truth. We postulate one reality, take our stand upon that and work our way towards the other; the two together form the total reality and together can they give the integral life fulfilment. As I have said, die history of mankind, as a matter of fact, the whole history of creation gives a graphic picture of the interaction of this double movement. There are ages and countries in which one or the other of the two takes precedence and special or exclusive emphasis. But the inner story is always a converging movement. Parallel lines meet at infinity, each overpasses its own limit and touches and coalesces with the other. The marriage of Heaven and Earth, of even Heaven and Hell, is a very ancient dream. It is an aspiration ingrained in existence. It is a prophecy that shall be fulfilled and is being worked out every moment. II
For an integral vision of human achievement and perfection we may consider another interesting contrast between the East and the West. We usually attach the word "freedom" or "liberty" to Western culture and civilisation as expressing its essential character: similarly it is bondage, submission, suppression of the individual and individuality that come up in our mind when we think of Eastern culture and civilisation. The judgment is not without truth, so far as it goes; but looked at Page 170 from a different angle, a deeper standpoint, the true judgment should be, curious to say, just the contrary. The East does not consider the individual in his social behaviour in terms of freedom and liberty but of service and obligation, not in terms of rights but of duties. The Indian term for right and duty is the same—adhikara. The word originally and usually meant duty, one's sphere of work or service, capacity: the meaning of "right" was secondary and only latterly, probably as a result of the impact from the West, has gained predominance. The West measures human progress by the amount of rights gained for the individual or for the group. It does not seem to have any other standard: submission, obedience, any diminution of the sense of separate individuality meant slavery and loss of human value and dignity. It was the Greek perhaps, with Socrates as the great pioneer, who first declared the supremacy of the individual reason- (although he himself obeyed in all things his guardian angel, the Daemon). In India, generally in the East, the value of the individual is estimated in another way. So long as he is in the society, the individual is bound by its demands: he has to serve it according to his best capacity. That is the dharma—the Law—that one has to observe conscientiously. But if he chooses, he can break the bonds forthwith, come out, come out of the society altogether and be free absolutely —that is the only meaning of freedom. In the West the individual is taught to remain in the world and with the society, maintain his individuality and independence and gradually enlarge them in and through the natural fetters and bondages that a collective life and efficient organisation demands and inevitably imposes. The East, on the contrary, asks the individual never to protest and assert his individuality, which is in their view only another name for Ignorant egoism, but to know his position in the social scheme and fulfil the duties and obligations of that position. But the individual has the freedom not to enter into the social frame at all. If he chooses freedom as his ideal, it is the supreme freedom that he must choose, out of the chain of a terrestrial life. He can become the spiritual "outlaw", the sannyasi; the word means one who has abandoned everything totally and absolutely. The contrast points to a synthesis parallel to or an extension Page 171 of the one we spoke of earlier. The first thing to note is that the individual is the source of all progress; the individual has the right, as it is also his duty to maintain himself and fulfil himself, grow to his largest and highest dimensions. Secondly, the individual has to take cognisance of the others, the whole humanity, in fact, even for the sake of his own progress. The individual is not an isolated entity, a freak product in Nature, but is integrated into it, a part and parcel of its texture and composition. Indeed the individual has a double role to perform, first to increase himself and secondly to increase others. Using the terms which the Sartrian view of existence has put into vogue, we can say, the individual en soi (in himself) is the individual in commonalty with others, living and moving in and through every other person; and then there is the individual pour soi (for himself), that is to say, existing for himself, apart and away from others, in his own inner absolute autonomy. The individual is individualised, i.e. raises and lifts himself and then becomes the spearhead breaking through the level where Nature stands fixed, leading others to follow and raise themselves. The individual is the power of organised self-consciousness; the growth of the individual means the growth of this power of organised consciousness. And growth means ascension or evolution from level to level. The individual starts from the organic cell, that is the lower end, it progresses through various gradations of the vital and mental worlds till he reaches the culmination of its growth in the Spirit as atman. But this vertical growth must be reflected in a horizontal growth too. There is a solidarity among the individuals forming the collective 'humanity so that the progress of one means the progress of others in the same direction, at least a chance and possibility opened for an advance. On the other hand, it may be noted that unless the collectivity rises to a certain level the individual too cannot go very far from it. A higher lift in the individual presupposes a corresponding or some minimum lift in others. There cannot or should not be too great a rift between the individual and the collective. As I said, the East usually ignores this correspondence and posits an exclusive either-or relation between the two terms. The individual, according to it, can reach its true individuality Page 172 by only dissolving it—in the Infinite. Of course, I am referring to an extreme position which is general in the East and symptomatic of its fundamental character. The West does not concern itself with these higher lines of individual growth and fulfilment, it limits the individual within the social frame and his mundane or profane life; but what we learn from this outlook is the necessity of the collective growth through which only can the individual thrive and grow. It is however a growth in extension, rather than in intensity i.e. depth and height. This outlook errs in the limitation put upon individuality, precisely identifying it more or less with the "egoism" to which the spirituality of the East objects. This normal individual in its normal development cannot go very far, nor can he lead the others, the society or humanity, to a perfect and supreme fulfilment. The ego-bound normal individuality must transcend itself—exactly the thing that the East teaches; only this transcendence need not mean an abolition of all individuality, but a transformation, a higher integration in a spiritualised, a universalised and divinised individuality. Such an individual will not be like the blind leading the blind, one ego, in its half-light, with its small narrow mental formation imposing its ignorant and ineffective will upon others in the same state of consciousness, but, as I have said, a universalised individual, who has identified himself with all and everyone in his being and consciousness, who has also at the same time transcended himself and others and attained a supreme unitary consciousness and being. It is such a person who is called the leader of human or terrestrial evolution and they who are of the same make are the pioneers who shall build heaven upon earth. Towards that consummation, these two great world currents, East and West, are moving carrying each its own truth and contributing to the realisation of the integral truth that is to take body here below. Page 173 |