-023_The Tragic Spirit in Nature

THE wages of sin, it is said, is death. Well, it can, with equal if not greater truth, be said that the wages of virtue too is death! It seems as though on this mortal earth nothing great or glorious can be achieved which is not marred somehow or other, sometime or other. The blazon of virtue goes very rarely without a bar sinister branded across. Some kind of degradation, ignominy or frustration always attends or rounds. off the spectacle of wonder. In the moral world too there seems to exist an inexorable law that action and reaction are equal in degree and opposite in kind.

The glorious First Consul and Emperor did not end in a­blaze of glory: he had to live and die as the commonest of prisoners. Even his great prototype, the mighty Caesar, did not meet a different fate – he too fell –

0, what a fall was there, my countrymen!

Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, ¹

A Jeanne d'Arc, another glorious creature, Deliverer of France, the sweetest thing that ever put on a human body, was burnt as a witch. Socrates had to drink the hemlock for having brought down heavenly knowledge upon earth. The Christ, God's own son and beloved, perished on the Cross. Krishna, the Avatara, was killed by a chance arrow; and Arjuna, the peerless hero of Kurukshetra, Krishna's favourite, had to see days when he could not even lift his own bow with which he once played havoc. And in our own days, a Rama­krishna, who could cure souls could not cure his own cancer.

¹ Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Act III, Sc. II             

This is the "tears of things" – spoken of by a great poet – the tragedy that is lodged in the hearts of things.

There runs a pessimistic vein in Nature's movement. Due to the original Inconscience out of which she is built and also because of a habit formed through millenniums it is not possible for her to expect or envisage anything else than decay, death and frustration in the end or on the whole. To every rise there must be a fall, a crest must end in a trough. Nature has not the courage nor the faculty to look for any kind of perfection upon earth. Not that within her realm one cannot or should not try for the good; the noble, even the perfect, but one must be ready to pay the price. Good there is and may be, but it is suffered only on payment of its Danegeld to Evil. That is the law of sacrifice that seems to be fundamental to Nature's governance.

The Evil, we have said, is nothing else than the basis of unconsciousness or Inconscience in Nature. It is this which pulls the being – whatever structure of consciousness can be reared upon it-down to decay and frustration. It is the force of gravitation or inertia. Matter is unconsciousness; the body, formed basically of matter, is unconsciousness too. The natural tendency of Matter is towards disintegration and dissolution; the body, therefore, is mortal – bhasmantamidam sariram. The scope and range of mortality is measured by the scope and range of unconsciousness. Matter is the most concrete and solid form of unconsciousness; but it casts its shadow upon the higher levels too – life and mind always lie in the penumbra of this original evil.

     A great personality means a great rise in consciousness, therefore it means also a strain upon the normal consciousness and hence a snap or scission sometime and somewhere. As the poet describes the tragic phenomenon –

– poised on the unreachable abrupt

snow-solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light,

then ceases broken and spent, ¹…

The tragedy can happen in either of two ways. The in-

¹ Sri Aurobindo: "In Horis Aeternum", Collected Poems & Plays 

individual's own unconsciousness can reach and overthrow and spoil his higher poise, or the collective unconsciousness too can invade and overwhelm the individual in his high status, who is declared, not unoften, the highbrow, an enemy of the people – although atonement is sometimes attempted at a late period (as in the case of the Christ or Jeanne d'Arc). A way, however, was discovered in India by which one could avoid this life's inevitable tragic denouement. It was very simple, viz, to rise up from the inert ignorant unconsciousness, rise sufficiently high and fly or shoot into the orbits of other suns from where there is no more downfall, being totally free from all earthly downpull.

But this need not be the only solution. Matter (the basic unconsciousness) was the master in this material world because, it was not properly faced and negotiated. One sought to avoid and bypass it. It was there Sphinx-like and none stopped to answer its riddle. The mystery is this. Matter, material Nature that is dubbed unconsciousness is not really so. That is only an appearance. Matter is truly inconscient, that is to say, it has an inner core of consciousness which is its true reality. This hidden flame of consciousness should be brought out from its cave and made manifest, dynamic on the surface. Then it will easily and naturally agree to submit to the higher law of Immortality. This would mean a reconditioning, a trans­mutation of the very basis of mind and life. The material foundation, the body conditions thus changed will bring about that status of the wholeness of consciousness which holds and stabilises the Divine in the human frame, which never suffers from any scar or diminution even in its terrestrial embodiment.