-109_The World Tragedy

 

SHAKESPEARE in giving expression to a most poignant experience of human life says – we all know the most familiar and famous lines – in a most poignant manner:

 

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right! – ¹

 

The poignancy comes not so much from the fact that this is a "naughty world," a cruel world, an unending sea of troubles which you have to brave and bear and fight constantly against: it is not merely that the world is painful and dolorous and even wicked but that it wants to remain so; even if you want to lift it up, out of its maladies, it sinks down back again into its familiar mud, and brings down with it the daring physician. The world does not tolerate its saviour: for this crime it retaliates

upon whoever seeks to meddle in its affairs, brands him as an enemy of the people, puts him on the cross. The old law must continue, the wrongs must be preserved, and whatever good happens in spite of eveything must also be doomed and swallowed up by the wrong. The great poet declares again:

 

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;²

 

In the end all traces of good are wiped away: it is sheer black, bleak, cursed track, this creation.

Yes, if you want to cure this ailing and insane world, if you have the ambition to strike a wholesome light in this

 

¹ Hamlet, Act I, Sc. V.

² Julius Caeser, Act III, Sc. II. 

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dismal darkness, if you exert yourself a little to turn it and set it on the right path, pour a little of goodwill in the mephistophelian stuff that the world is, well, your fate is Hamlet's – you create a yet greater desolation around you. That is the way out of this tragedy.

 

 

A celebrated scientist elated with the wonderful discoveries of modern science and its more wonderful promises of the future seems to have said that if he could get a foothold just outside the earth, he meant perhaps outside its gravitational field, he could as it were, twirl the earth upon his finger, with a little push dislodge it from its orbit and its axis. Well, what he said is true and prophetic but the foothold outside has to be outside the gravitational field, not of his physical existence, (the astronauts are trying it today), but outside his physical or normal consciousness. He has to rise above the physical, material status of his being. There is the error that Hamlet committed in spite of his cultured and enlightened mind: not through the enlightened mind alone but through the enlightened heart, through the enlightened vital, even through an enlightened physical consciousness, the remedy of the earthly malady has to be sought, not to meet violence with violence, not to be resentful, not to retaliate-that is what the Bible means when it says, "Resist not evil" – but rise in one's consciousness, above the dualities as the eastern wisdom says, seek a higher source from where springs the infallible energy of a purer light. The higher the consciousness, the more effective its action.

Rise in your being and consciousness and by your aspiration and realisation and contagion make others too rise. Then the world will find naturally and spontaneously its lever to shift its old and unhappy basic stand to something higher, greater – diviner.

 

 

The complete life is a full circle, one half only is visible to us, real to us: the other half is invisible like the far side of the moon. The ancients used to call these halves, one the higher half (Parardha) and the other the lower half (Aparardha) 

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The lower half is the domain of death, the Upanishads declare, the higher half is the domain of immortality. As we start our journey upon earth we begin with the ordinary life, the life of death, and we pass through it gaining experience, growing in consciousness; and then when we have crossed the stage we enter into the domain beyond death and begin to learn, to partake of the life immortal.

Dante, the great Christian poet speaks likewise of a life in Hell and a life in Paradise, first, the tragedy, the life of sorrows, transmuted in the end into the Divine Comedy, the life of happiness and bliss. There is an intermediary passage in between through which the poet leads us from the one to the other: the transition is spoken of as a stage of purification through which one has to pass to shake off the human dross from his nature and put on and become in substance the noble metal.

It is to be noted that death does not mean literally or exclusively the physical event, disintegration and disappearance of the body: it is rather the symbol of the corrosive consciousness of the ordinary ignorant life. There is the ignorant consciousness making up the lower half circle of the integral life and there is the luminous consciousness making up the higher half circle. In between there is, as I have said, a border range which partakes of the nature of both. In psychological terms, the lower is the predominantly vital and physical ranges with a modicum of the mental shading into the higher mental. Up till here it is more or less the region of ignorance. Then comes the higher mind with its aspiring will: this is the purificatory agent – the purgatory – the crucible where forces are generated to stir and change and renovate the inferior sphere of our life. Indeed it is the region of the ajña-cakra in Tantric terminology: in modern terms you may call it the control-room, or in most modern lunar vocabulary, the command-module. It is from here that the first changes towards a higher and purer functioning are initiated in our lower limbs, the body, the vital and even the lower mental. Beyond is the overhead and overmental – and still higher ranges. The luminous consciousness, the touch of immortality begins with the overhead and the overmental. As we enter the overhead, we shake off the shadow of death upon us and our mortal nature. The Upanishad

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speaks of two kinds of knowledge that have to be known, two forms of consciousness that have to be acquired in order to become the full integral Divine being. First you have to know, to become aware of the existence of ignorance, the primal or primitive nature and through that awareness or knowledge probe into its character and movement and destiny. Ignorance, pure ignorance leads towards disintegration and death, but to be a ware of the ignorance is already a step towards enlightening the ignorance and redeeming it into knowledge. By this knowledge of the ignorance you release it from the grip of death; when you have the full consciousness of the ignorance you transcend the region of death, and free from death, free from ignorance you have the knowledge of knowledge and with the knowledge of knowledge, that is to say, with the full revelation of it you are one with Truth that is Immortality. The delight of immortality is love; love's own status and home is Paradise.

The Paradise, the svargyam lokam of the Upanishads is not necessarily utterly afar and aloof, sundered from this world. The kingdom of heaven instead of being wholly within and absolutely beyond can be and has to be brought out and down upon and into earth, established here below in the fullness of its own glory. That is the material epiphany, the transformation of the physical nature, the ultimate and inevitable destiny of earth and mankind.

Such is the full cycle of human life – in the beginning the birth in mortality and in ignorance, then a process of developing and purificatory consciousness, and then the entry into the full blaze of light and force of Consciousness leading to a rebirth and re-embodiment in immortality, transforming the ignorant death-bound body into the glorious luminous body upon material earth, the embodiment of love Divine. 

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