I undoubtedly scapegoat Islamists and Islamic culture at times

Against Dogma

This morning while I was on the balcony, I had an interesting experience: the experience of man’s effort, in all its forms and through all the ages, to approach the Divine. And I seemed to be growing wider and wider so that all the forms and all the ways of approaching the Divine attempted by man would be contained in the present Work.
It was represented by a kind of image in which I was as vast as the Universe, and each way of approaching the Divine was like a tiny image containing the characteristic form of this approach. And my impression was this: Why do people always limit, limit themselves? Narrow, narrow, narrow! They understand only when it is narrow.
Take all! Take all within you. And then you will begin to understand — you will begin.– The Mother (from Mother’s Agenda, dated June 6, 1958)

You, the Ultimate Reality, are All in All.Atheism confesses the ineffability of Your Essence. Polytheism personifies Your manifold Attributes. Monotheism witnesses the unity of Your Being. In every God-Ideal an emanation of You shines forth. The heart receives of You as much as it can contain. When the heart is supple it is capable of every form. Then Your manifestations surpass the limitations of belief.– Pir Zia Inayat Khan

The most important discovery for me has been that once you discover the inner being, you can widen it to including anything and everything in your experience. There is no need to be anti-anything if you contact this inner being. I’ve never caught Sri Aurobindo saying that any school of thought was entirely deluded, wrong, or foolish. Once the inner being is contacted and once one starts to observe from that vantage point, rather than from the dividing ego, one can see the partial truths that any perspective contains. So the whole dualistic notion of “this is right and this is wrong” vanishes. You start looking for a universal Truth, and even the most foolish can embody this universal Truth, however much they may distort or pervert it. It is just a question of developing the inner vision that can see beyond the masks.

This is why I can’t understand a lot of Traditionalist writers like Seyyed Hossein Nasr and others (I’m reading Nasr’s Knowledge and the Sacred these days), who, in spite of some of their excellent ideas and highly developed intellect, seem very stuck in dualistic thinking. They speak of inner growth or annulling the ego, but I hardly find them looking into what the practical implications of such a praxis would be. Many of the Traditionalists are anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-modernity, anti-secularism, somewhat sexist (in a subtle way, by upholding the notion that women are always feminine and that in contrast “boys will be boys”) and definitely homophobic (Julius Evola, the fascist Traditionalist, seems to have a huge chip on his shoulder regarding homosexuality).

From the spiritual perspective, all generalizations are dangerous. Anybody who takes any group — somebody will choose scientists, someone else will choose secular leftists, someone else, religious fundamentalists (as I undoubtedly scapegoat Islamists and Islamic culture at times; this is my own existential bias, a samskara that has to be annulled for the sake of my own growth), and yet someone else, New Age mystics and gurus — and scapegoats them, or starts to blame them for everything, is clearly not in control of his or her nafs (ego).

To be anti-anything is to underestimate God. There is nothing that is not accepted by God, and nothing that will not be ultimately evolved by God toward God (as he is the Alpha and the Omega). Indeed, what else does the Aurobindoan Superman represent, but the godlike ability to accept everything as it is in order to heal and transmute it?

Unity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embracing unity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillized by knowledge into a calm ecstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for the world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of knowledge accepts and transforms the heart’s obscure inspirations and lends itself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded together on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and accepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man’s integral self-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic self-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of supermanhood.

Not that this is easy! Sri Aurobindo often referred to his yoga as a “battle”, and there is no doubt that it is one. The practitioner of the integral yoga is sure to face attacks from every direction, because he or she is seeking to take all into their consciousness. This doesn’t just mean an intellectual exercise: building up elaborate intellectual maps, or even intellectual syntheses. It means, literally, taking everything into your consciousness — including all the pain, all the suffering, all the contrary movements and all those who appear to be opposing you.

That, truly, is the way of inner equality as Sri Aurobindo describes so beautifully in The Synthesis of Yoga. All phenomena are equal in the eyes of the Witness, and it is through those eyes of love that the integral seeker wishes to view the universe. What Sri Aurobindo teaches is that when a large enough group of people can start to truly accept the terrestrial universe as it is (by raising their own level of awareness to that of the universal Divine Truth-consciousness), it will then begin to evolve of its own accord towards greater self-awareness.

But again, this is no mean feat. The lower nature can resist this process of growth for a long time. So far, I have only glimpsed this inner being that I write about. To become permanently aware of it, to sustain that consciousness, to live in the soul, is a great challenge that requires that one break all of one’s superficial attachments and face the pain and fear that they conceal.

As a friend recently told me via e-mail, a lot of people who speak about spirituality mostly just have an intellectual vitalism with no true psychic leading at the fore — in other words, Knowledge and Power without Love. It is so easy to get impressed with yourself after having had spiritual experiences, and then create a new false identity for yourself on the basis of new — perhaps more profound and inclusive, but nevertheless limiting in terms of your own growth — beliefs. If you do this, you go straight back into unconsciousness, and many people (myself included) seem to vacillate between consciousness and unconsciousness for a long time. Starting to live in the soul is very difficult. For me this is the first priority: to develop and purify the inner being, and break all the attachments to the outer beings and things.

But once that soul widens out into the Infinite — freedom at last! So say the sages. That is the true liberation. Finally, you emerge in an all-inclusive silence and wideness that nothing can ever perturb, and you are free to make the right choices every step of the way. Posted by ned on April 16, 2007. Filed under Aphorisms, Contemplations.