THE IMMORTAL OVERSELF
by Paul Brunton
JUST as it has been necessary to purify our ideas about I - just as it will
later be necessary to purify our ideas of what is meant by God - so it is now
necessary to purify our ideas of what is meant by immortality. We did not
deny the 'I'. We shall not deny God. We are not now denying immortality.
But fallacious conceptions of it must be gotten rid of.
It has already been learnt that personality is a changing series of
thoughts, a moving cycle of states of consciousness and not a permanent
fixed self. Just as the body is a complex of component parts, so is the 'I'
a complex of interconnected thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and memories.
So long as these thoughts stream after each other in a series, so long can
the personality endure but when the stream stops flowing then personality
cannot survive. We witness this even during lifetime for in deep sleep there
are no thoughts and then we lose our sense of 'I'.
The personal 'I' is but a bundle of impermanent hopes and transient fears, a
little sheaf of cravings that change with the changing years. Nothing that
we know among them is immortal even during this present earth-life; how then
can they be immortal through all eternity? To cultivate a belief in a
personal ego that will permanently survive in a state of fixation is to
prolong the illusion that even now blinds our eyes to truth - unless of
course we choose to regard the series of continuous reincarnations as a kind
of immortality which, in one sense, it certainly is.
But this conception will not satisfy those who demand conscious unbroken
continuity as a characteristic of their immortality. We shall certainly
exist after death, whether in the dream-like stage with which it begins, the
sleep-like stage with which it ends or the new reincarnation which completes
the whole circle of personality. Yet in none of these shall we have done
more than achieve a mere survival. Let this satisfy those who want it but it
is not the same as true deathlessness, which can be achieved only by
transcending the transient personality.
It is here that once again the importance of our discoveries about the
mind-made nature of time becomes apparent. For the question of immortality
is tied to the question of time and cannot be separated from it. In its
common form, it is naively supposed to be the perpetual continuance of the
same personal self in eternity. But this is metaphysically impossible. The
mere fact that a person appears abruptly in time makes him inescapably
mortal. For whatever has a beginning must have an ending. This is an
inexorable law of Nature. Yet, the notion of the eternal existence of the
same person in a world which is itself subject to eternal change, a notion
which constitutes the orthodox concept of immortality, is one of the fond
delusions which man has always liked to harbour.
This popular notion which is based on the powerful hope of continued
personal existence in time, is not the metaphysical one. Immortality is not
to be honoured by its being a prolonged time-series, which is merely a
quantitative gauge, but by its mode of consciousness, which is a qualitative
one. Its value is in us, not in time. We may live a million years as a worm
or a brief day as a man. Is the worm's immortality to be preferred to the
man's mortality?
Men ordinarily love their own fettered existence more than they love
anything else. Consequently their notion of a worth while after-death state
is one wherein they continue that same bondage to the surface life of the
senses in which they were held on earth, just as their notion of a worth
while goal of human evolution is one wherein they can personally enjoy
perpetual bliss. They do not comprehend that this is only one stage farther
than the materialist view which would make man but an elongated ape and
which would limit his experience to whatever manifests itself to his bodily
senses alone.
They do not comprehend that if they are to experience egoistic existence
after death it will have to include all the pains and disappointments of
egoistic existence before death. There is no freedom from suffering anywhere
in the universe so long as there is no freedom from the ego. Hence even
those who fondly believe and ardently hope for such a personal survival,
such an endless continuance of the miserable limitations and unsatisfactory
defects of their earth-life, will even there have one day to wake up and
start in quest of the Overself. For the call of the inner life can nowhere
be evaded although it can often be postponed.
It is the final purpose of human existence, wherever the drama of that
existence be set. Hence they too will one day have to seek escape from time
to timelessness. We may mitigate the apparent harshness of this doctrine as
we please in order to help those unable to bear its full brunt, as
theologians and priests have mitigated it with their theory of a permanent
personal soul arbitrarily made static at a certain age of a certain
earth-body, but we can do so only at the cost of its truth.
An endless prolongation of personal existence with all its narrow interests
and parochial experience would be as unbearable in the end as an endless
prolongation of waking life uninterrupted by the boon of sleep. And yet even
in this widespread longing for personal continuance we can detect the
beginnings of what will one day grow into the nobler longing to live forever
in the true immortality. For it is an unconscious perception that human
existence does possess something within it which is unaffected by events in
time and is therefore genuinely eternal, something which stands apart from
all the miserable mutations of the flesh and the 'I'. It is indeed an
unformulated intuition which, hiding among the perishable elements of
personality, affirms that there is an imperishable principle which cannot be
brought to an end with the end of the body.
The popular error which transfers what it knows, namely, the characteristics
of the physical body, to what it does not know, namely, the mind for which
that body is but a cluster of ideas, must be corrected. When this is done
the desire for the endless continuance of a body-based 'I' naturally sinks
to a secondary place. When the mind-essence is recognized as the true ground
upon which the whole structure of this 'I' has been built, it will also be
recognized as something which is never born and consequently never dies, as
what was is and shall be. It can then be seen that if all our memories
involve time, they also involve as a background the existence of something
in them which is out of time.
This view of immortality as belonging to the higher individuality of
Overself rather than to the lower personality will then replace the former
one, which is ultimately doomed to suffer the anguish of frustrated desire
whereas the true view bathes a man in increasing peace the better it is
understood. When man continues firmly and unfailingly to identify himself in
thought with this, his higher individuality, quite naturally he comes to
share its attitude. And from this attitude the belief, 'I shall die
eventually' is entirely absent. To imagine is to create. That which a man
thinks, he becomes. Rightly thinking himself immortal, he consequently
attains immortality.
The common conception of immortality would make it an indefinite
prolongation of personal existence. The mystic conception would make it an
indefinite prolongation of personal bliss. The philosophic conception,
however, transcends both these notions because it discards the personal life
and replaces it by its ultimate non-egoistic root, the individual Overself.
The first two are still within the time-series, albeit it is not the kind of
time we ordinarily know on earth, whereas the third is beyond any possible
consideration of time or succession. It IS.
Such true deathlessness can be attained only in the Overself, for this does
not derive its life, as the body does, from another principle. It has life
of itself. Consequently, the body has to give up in death what it has
previously received but the Overself never having had anything added to it,
has nothing to give up. It cannot but be immortal for it is part of the
World-Mind and what is true of that must also be true of itself. That which
is forever in union with the World-Mind must itself be forever free from a
change like death.
What is meant when it is said that the Overself is man's higher
individuality must now be explained. We know that the World Mind must be
everywhere yet it is certainly not everywhere to the personal consciousness.
There must be a point-instant in space-time perception where the latter can
meet it. In most mystical experience such a point is first felt to exist
within the heart. But the World-Mind cannot be confined within such a
limited perception. And later mystical experience always transcends this
centre within the heart and largely detaches the consciousness from the body
altogether. Yet the finite self can never bring the World Mind in its
fullness within this experience simply because finitude would itself merge
and vanish while trying to do so. This mystical meeting-point, the Overself,
represents the utmost extent to which the finite self can consciously share
in the ultimate existence.
It is that fragment of God which dwells in and yet environs man, a fragment
which has all the quality and grandeur of God but not all the amplitude and
power of God. The difference between the World-Mind and Overself is only one
of scope and degree, not one of kind, for they are both essentially the same
'stuff'. We may climb as high as this highest self but not beyond, it. Thus
our personal life is a phase of the Overself's life. The latter's existence
in its turn is a phase of the World-Mind's existence. Through this chain of
relations the little self has an everlasting kinship with the cosmic one. It
can become aware through philosophy of this kinship but it cannot transcend
the relation itself.
The World-Mind apparently breaks itself up into an endless multitude of such
higher selves but after it has done so it paradoxically remains as unlimited
and as ultimate, as undiminished in its own being as ever. The notion that
the Infinite Existence has divided itself up into such units is correct only
if we understand first, that this division has not involved any reduction in
its essence and second, that it has not meant any real parting of them from
this essence. We can best understand this by remembering what happens in our
own mental activity. Our innumerable ideas are a kind of division of the
mind but do not really involve its exhaustion for the ideas not only arise
but must vanish back into it.
Although the mind perpetually empties itself into thoughts, it is never less
itself, never less its own single presence. Nor are these thoughts separate
at any moment from the mind. In the same way, except that it is not affected
by the transiency which affects all thoughts, the Overself is not separate
from the World-Mind. Every Overself exists in the World-Mind just as
different thoughts exist in one and the same human mind. The World-Mind's
consciousness may multiply or divide itself a million times but its stuff is
not really divisible; it only appears so.
It may be noticed that the term Overself has here been used only in the
singular number. Yet if it is not the World-Mind itself but only a refracted
fragment of it, a spark from its flame, should it not be right to use this
term in the plural number also? The answer is that this would tend to give a
wrong impression that the Overself of one man is actually and eternally as
separate and isolate from that of another man as one reincarnation is as
separate and isolate from another. If there be a slight technical confusion
in using the singular number alone, there would be immeasurably more
confusion if, in using the plural, this dire error of any radical difference
existing between them were to be authenticated.
The Overself of each man is historically distinct from that of another man
but only in the sense that each has over-shadowed or animated a different
series of reincarnated persons and presided over their, different destinies.
just as there is no intrinsic difference between individual sun rays
themselves, so there is no intrinsic difference between one Overself and
another, but just as each ray will have a special relation of its own with
the objects it encounters so each Overself will have a special relation of
its own with the cycles of reincarnated personalities.
Like a single ray it shines down upon a particular person whereas as the
World-Mind like the sun itself shines on all persons alike. Each Overself in
itself is exactly the same as and all one with another. In other words, the
difference is only relational and not intrinsic. There is certainly not the
separateness between them that there is between two persons and yet there is
not entirely the likeness which exists between two identical things.
The experience which one man has when he first comes into the consciousness
of the Overself is absolutely identical with that which all other men have
when they too come or shall come into it. There is no difference in any
detail. The contradictions which exist in recorded mystical experience arise
either because of the mistakes, illusions and misinterpretations made by
mystics who lack philosophical training or because they have not had an
authentic experience of the Overself at all. This will become clear when we
reach the subject later in this course. Nevertheless the memory-content kept
latently within an Overself is absolutely distinct in every case because the
series of personalities projected from it has necessarily been distinct from
the series projected by another.
This memory-content cannot be abolished; it is there and from our space-time
standpoint must be recognized as establishing a claim to individuality of a
sort on the part of an Overself. Consequently we say that the Overself
possesses a higher kind of individuality but it does not possess
personality. The Overself of one man is distinct from the Overself of
another but not separate from it; at one with it but not identical with it.
Hence if two men who deeply hated each other were suddenly to come into the
realization of their own Overself, they would just as suddenly mutually love
each other. If they could sustain this realization then there would be
perfect and permanent sympathy between them instead of the strife which
formerly engaged them.
The Overself is consciously divine and can never lose its really universal
nature any more than the sunray can lose its real nature as light, divided a
million-fold though the latter be. We may no more impose such personalistic
limitations upon it than the single and simple corpuscular cell in the body
of a vertebrate animal - which would be but one out of many millions of such
cells - may impose its particular limitations upon the central consciousness
of the animal itself. From the human standpoint the Overself is - the deeper
layer of mind where man can become conscious of God. It is the timeless
spaceless immanence of the universal being in a particular centre.
Why am I myself and not somebody else? This is an important question which
can find a final answer only when we can penetrate into the consciousness of
the Overself which projected this particular 'I' into incarnation, for an
entire tangle of evolutionary necessity and karmic history would need to be
unraveled. Meanwhile it may be said that the Overself projects itself into a
series of separate beings but instead of holding its light they hold its
shadow. Although the Overself is but a segment of the one World-Mind its
expressions during cosmic manifestation, that is personalities will each
possess traits of their own which differentiate one from the other.
These are the transient differences which divide the innumerable living
beings but they all exist on a lower level than the Overself which eternally
unites them. And just as each of the figures in a dreamer's mind lives a
characteristic life of its own in a semi-independent way, so the
personalities projected by the Overself largely follow their own course once
they have been placed at its starting-point. The Overself within the person
is always the same and always aware of its relation to it, even though the
person is so ignorant of this relation. The memory of the essential
characteristics of all former related incarnations are registered and
preserved within the Overself, although it does not need to sit and brood
over this knowledge, which is kept latent.
This higher self does not itself evolve through widening experience like the
personal self which it sends forth to taste of the fruit of the Tree of good
and evil. Each reincarnated 'I' may be symbolically thought of as being but
a point dwelling in the superior self's infinite and eternal experience. The
body provides the field of experience, thought and feeling provide the means
of experience, whilst the higher self is the ultimate experiencing being in
man, the mystical "Word made flesh." It is the inner ruler of the ignorant
personality, the divine deputy to profane life.
It stands to its related successively reincarnated persons in the relation
of a sun to the planets which circle around it. In this sense, as that which
exists behind and above his sensation-emotion-thinking being, as a
thread-soul by which all the innumerable reincarnations are joined together,
we may call it the real being of a man. And although as the hidden observer
it owns the ego it does not do so in the sense of personal ownership. It is
as disinterested and as impartial towards this reflected shadow of its own
being as towards all others. The explanation of why the division involved in
such self-fragmentation was the only way in which any 'I' could come into
being at all - is a most metaphysical one and consequently a most subtle one.
It may be understood better by understanding what is involved in the
everyday act of seeing.
If we were to see white alone in everything and everywhere and always; if we
were never to see a red or a blue or even a faint grey; if we had never
known at any time any other colour than white, would it be possible for us
to see anything at all? For without the experience of contrast we would not
even be aware of white as such. Where everything is always white and where
we have never known existence without it, we would not only be unconscious
of all other possible colours and chromatic variations but we would also be
unconscious of white as being white. For the blackness of coal would be
meaningless without, say, the whiteness of snow with which it could be
contrasted.
Now the Overself's original consciousness is a single and undifferentiated
one. This means that its only awareness is of existence but not of personal
existence. It is conscious yet not self-conscious in space and time. But
such a consciousness is in a certain sense equivalent to having no
consciousness at all. For experience can only begin when we can begin to
distinguish between something that is, be it our own self or an object, from
something that is not. We can know anything whether it be our own self or an
object, only when we can oppose it by a second thing. Therefore a single
undifferentiated consciousness is, from a merely human standpoint of course,
like having no consciousness at all.
Thus self-awareness can arise only when there is awareness of a contrast
between two things. We become aware of the existence of anything only in and
by becoming aware of what it is not at the same moment. For unless we can
distinguish it in this way we cannot distinguish it at all. Now, the very
first of such contrasts must necessarily be that which exists between the
self and what he is outside it. That is to say, the opposition of the idea
of 'not-me' must arise if the mind is to become aware of the idea of 'me'.
If there were no second thing there could be no conscious existence for the
'me'. The existence of 'me' implies the imperative need of a co-existing and
contrasting 'not-me'.
Self-consciousness must limit and restrict itself by 'not-me' if it is to be
at all. The one must always presuppose the other. For to know anything at
all is to draw a clear circle within which consciousness must lie enclosed
and outside which there will simultaneously lie whatever is to be known as
not itself. Knowledge can only come into being if it is knowledge of
something which is not the knower. Hence the very idea of a self implies its
being distinguished from what is not the self, which means from what is
outside it.
Now, if the Overself is to set up the opposition of an 'other' which is
separate and distinct from itself, its first step must necessarily be to
limit a part of itself to less than what it really is, to contract away part
of its own infinitude and freedom. Its second step must be a narrow and
intensive concentration on that which it thus presents to itself and which
is now seemingly independent and apart. Every concentration of mental power
involves a self-forgetting proportionate to the intensity with which
attention becomes absorbed in the thought of that which is external to it.
Its third step must be to provide this limited ego with a field of
experience to complement and complete it, of which it can become conscious
as something outside itself. Thus the projected person has come into being.
It exists through what is external to it and the latter exists through it;
both are interlocked. The two are inseparably coupled in each indivisible
moment of individual consciousness. Thus the person's world-experience is
born and in so far as the one confronts the other, self-consciousness is
aroused, just as the electric current which meets with the obstacle of a
piece of carbon during its onward flow, strives to overcome the resistance
and through this striving generates light.
This resistance which the 'me' requires is got through the limitation
provided by its space-time perceptions and sense-operations. In the case of
man the setting-up of the five senses produces the externalization of his
perceptions and consequently of experience, thus producing objects for his
consciousness and 'matter' for his belief. Nevertheless we must not fall
into the easy error of forgetting that this felt opposition does not render
consciousness independent of the world. It has already been shown that both
the 'me' and world unfold from a common source, the hidden mind. Their
opposition must therefore be only outwardly apparent and not inwardly
irreconcilable. They are still related and not isolated. For although felt
in experience as separate and opposed, they are known in analytic reflection
as joined and united.
Self-awareness must be bought at the heavy price of such a splitting up.
Those who ask why the ego be not Overself conscious from the first, do not
know what they ask for. It could only be born at all at the cost of having
some neighboring existence in reference to which it could have a meaning as
a distinct entity, as a personal self, and from which it could be
differentiated. For both personality and personal consciousness are modes
which limit the pure being of the unlimited Overself. The ego could only
have its separate experience by losing awareness of the unique and universal
principle that underlies it. We can know that we exist only by knowing that
some thing or some thought other than ourself, also exists. This is a
supreme law which must bind all intelligence, both that of the tiniest gnat
and of the Overself alike.
This is why the unlimited Overself must delimit its horizon, must make a
descent from its own transcendent Oneness into separate selves and must
reduce itself to setting up relations with them. Consequently, when the
universal and infinite Overself both limits and differentiates itself in
order to acquire self-consciousness, the portion of itself so limited and
finitized forgets its infinite character. In revealing the 'other' it veils
a part of itself; in setting up an object for experience it has also set up
a subject shrunken and dwarfed through this lapse into personality. This is
why nearly all creatures in this space-time world have forgotten their
divine origin.
Nevertheless we must never forget that the infinite World-Mind through its
intermediary the Overself dwells in everyone of its innumerable finite
centres just as they dwell in it. The roots of all creatures are planted in
the ground of a universal being whose life is common to them. Not one can
isolate itself from the World-Mind in fact although it may do so in belief,
any more than it can isolate a reflected image from the light itself.
Ultimately it borrows its very life from the Overself, never has been and
never can be disconnected from it.
The Hidden Side of Selfishness.
The Overself is truly an eternal image of World-Mind. Therefore it is
written in the Bible that God made man in his own image. The reference here
could never have been to the lower aspect of man, the petty creature who
frets and fumes his way through life. The phrase fits finely however to the
immeasurably higher aspect of this two-fold species. The fact that men have
turned round and denied their person, nay even sacrificed their person,
points to the presence within them of something which is different from the
person, points indeed toward the Overself. Each man therefore has two faces.
One is downturned toward the earth but the other is upturned toward
World-Mind. The first is the 'person' and the second is the Overself.
Why do we so pathetically feel our cramping limitations, our shameful
weakness, our saddening mortality, our mocking finiteness? It is only
because we unconsciously possess a point of view which transcends our normal
one that we are able to see how limited our little self is at all.
It is only because we are subterraneanly related to the infinite that we
know that we are finite beings at all. It is only because there exists
something in us which goes beyond us without losing its hold on us that we
are troubled by any aspirations at all. It is only, in short, because the
Overself is present behind its limited expression, the person, that the
latter can understand at all how limited it is.
The quick satisfaction we derive from material things, the prolonged absence
of the thought that one day we must inevitably die, even the very reality
which we attribute to the external world - all these when rightly understood
are symbolic promises and remote reflections of the sublimer satisfaction,
the genuine immortality and the intuited reality which the presence of the
Overself within even now unconsciously yields us. They speak not only of
what we secretly are but also of what we may openly become.
Every individual is necessarily incomplete because of his finitude. All his
endeavours, whatever direction they take, are expressions of his unconscious
quest for completeness, of his repeated search for self-satisfaction. Hence
all his characteristics bear an illusory resemblance to those of the
Overself and necessarily so for he is unconsciously and often distortedly
trying to express what truly belongs to him.
When we can come to regard the limitations of the surface self as ephemeral
ones, we open the gate to correct understanding of the hidden dimensionless
mind at its centre. The various distinctions which arise within this mind,
the innumerable thought-forms which are perpetually being born in it, do not
diminish or exhaust it. It is useful to consider each human incarnation to
be like a tiny wave of water upon the surface of a limitless sea. Each
wavelet has its individual and unique shape but all are formed within one
and the same sea. Each may think of itself as being but a tiny wave and
nothing more or it may think of itself as being not only a wavelet but also
as being not different from the sea itself.
Similarly each incarnate creature limits itself unnecessarily when it
refuses to realize that it is really not different in essential nature from
the Overself. Each is potentially grander and greater than it knows. If man
is slowly learning the hard lesson that a human life is a wavelet upon the
ocean of being which must sooner or later level itself out again, there is
still left the water of which the wave is composed. This idea may be
regarded as eternal death and hence undesirable from the limited point of
view of the person but it is eternal life from the larger point of view of
those who have analyzed the person and find it to be like a flickering
shadow which rises and sets with the rising and setting sun.
A metaphysical lesson drawn from the dreaming state may also help us here.
What is the true status of a number of different persons who are
convincingly seen during this state, who speak in clearly heard voices, who
carry on conversations with one another and take up different standpoints in
discussion but who finally vanish when the dreamer himself awakens? He then
knows that they were dramatized out of his own mind stuff and that therefore
they were all essentially one and the same in essence. He knows too that his
mind never really differentiated itself into these different figures but
only appeared to do so; that is, its own continuity and selfhood remained
unbroken throughout.
In the same way the Overself has always been the single being out of which
the many reincarnations have appeared, the sublime unity which always
escapes the doom of these multiple and perishable personalities whose
separateness is as much a surface illusion as the separateness of all those
dream figures. It is their truly abiding nature. It contains the highest
form of immortality. Again, because separateness vanishes during sleep the
selfish strife and evil born of it also vanish. The peace which then
suffuses a man and which is testified to by the lingering after-echoes felt
immediately upon awakening, could be his during wakefulness too if he would
deliberately and consciously subordinate this separateness.
It was earlier noted that everything throughout the universe is sentenced to
be forever in motion and forever in flux. But what do such changes mean
unless they mean that everything is forever making changes and thus
modifying its own identity? And in the case of human beings where - even
leaving out the equally definite but less perceptible bodily changes - the
thoughts and feelings alter so quickly that the conscious being of a few
minutes ago is not quite the same as the present one, the change in identity
is not only inescapable but also irretrievable. The mental state or
emotional mood which has passed away can never again be got back precisely
as it was. Do what we will we can not keep a fixed unbroken identity but
must submit to a perpetually changing one.
We are continually forced to surrender the 'me' from moment to moment. Then
why not yield to Nature's bidding and surrender it altogether? Why run
vainly after something we can never even hope to catch? To comprehend this
universal truth, to accept its inflexible lesson, to cease trying to cling
only to the transient identity of the personality, in short to refuse to
allow the 'me' thought to arrogate sovereignty to itself and thus dominate
its own thinker - this is the necessary prelude to opening the heavy door
which bars our way to discovery of what exists behind the 'me.' For this
reason every illumined religious, mystical and philosophical teacher has
voiced the need of self-surrender.
It may be objected that we feel the personality as the basis of all our
conscious existence, that to be conscious at all we have to pay the price of
finitude and that try as we may we cannot divorce consciousness from the
personality. How then can it be annihilated unless we want to annihilate our
own existence completely? The answer is that man first of all is called upon
to understand that the world in which he lives consists of various levels of
being, each one providing through the forms which it takes a perpetual space
time suggestion for the creature within it.
This done, he is not called upon to deny his own personal being but only to
deny his false conception of that being, that is to recognize it to be only
an underself. He is not even asked to say that it does not exist but only
that its existence is thought-constructed. He is asked to admit that his
present understanding of 'I' is incomplete and must be perfected. Do what he
may man cannot give up the 'I' for it is that which has brought him to
birth, but he can give up the illusions about it which hold him captive, the
wrong concepts wreathed around it which lead him astray into sin and suffering.
Strive as he may man cannot disentangle himself from desire for his earthly
existence depends upon it, but he can, when he becomes the personality's
witness, disentangle himself from his habitual enchainment to desire. He is
asked to dwell again and yet again in this strange new world of thought
until it eventually becomes as familiar and as intimate as his daily self.
If we assume that by metaphysical probing he discovers and by ultramystic
practice he sees at last that the 'I' is not in the body but the body is
really in the 'I'; if he realizes that the personal 'I' like everything else
within his ordinary experience is really a thought-construction which feigns
a permanent and stable entity of its own; if he penetrates deeply beneath it
and uncovers its hidden essence as mind, what has he done?
He has got rid of a mistaken idea - however powerful, however hypnotic and
however over-confident his belief in it formerly was - and he has
substituted for it the contrary idea of his higher individuality, the
Overself which can never be annihilated, which forever remains what it was,
alike in quality but distinct in characteristics from the World-Mind. The
personal consciousness which he has evolved after so many incarnations, with
so much effort and through so much toil, is not swept away. It remains.
Only, it takes its proper secondary place. It becomes subordinate to the
Overself. Both are there within the same zone of awareness. He keeps this
sense of his own personal transience alongside his sense of a sublime
ever-abidingness in the Overself.
If therefore he is seemingly called upon to part with the personal, he is
really called upon to receive consciously that unfettered peace-fraught
existence which is its origin. If he is seemingly asked to surrender the
Many, he is really asked to take full possession of the One which is their
background. If he is seemingly led to deny all formed and felt experience,
he is really led to accept the ultimate principle which permits such
experience to be possible at all. If he is forced to negate the products and
constructs of mind it is only that he may affirm the pure mind itself.
If he is asked not to assign an exaggerated value to a self which is
transitory by nature, it is only that he may perceive the unique value to be
assigned to an individuality which is permanent and real. Thus whatsoever he
seemingly loses is returned again to him deprived of nothing but its
transient shapes. The supersensual whole cannot be less than its sensual
part. Why then should anyone fear it?
If it be further asked how a man can play his part in the world's work and
fulfil his obligations to society unless he stand solidly upon the feet of
his own personality, the answer is that he who has unfolded this insight has
not altered his actual existence. For practical purposes he remains the same
man as before and plays the same role in society - more likely, he will play
a much better one. He is not deprived of the slightest capacity for useful
action, but on the contrary his discovery beneficially influences his
ethical standards and improves his external life. He is not called upon to
suppress personality but to suppress that blind infatuation.
With it which is the source of so many practical mistakes, moral sins and
social injustices; he is not required to submerge the needs of self but to
submerge their satisfaction at the cost of injury to others. What has such a
man lost in the end - His personality has not been destroyed but only
purified; his consciousness has not been paralysed but only disciplined to
understand itself better; his responsibilities have not been deserted but
rather fulfilled in the most conscientious manner; his possessions have not
been scattered but only turned into a trust to be used wisely.
But is it actually possible to take up such a philosophical attitude towards
one's own ego? it may finally be asked. Surely the feat of witnessing its
activities quite impartially must always be a theoretical and never a
practical achievement? We may discover the answer for ourself.
When we become intensely interested in an exquisitely beautiful musical
piece unfolding itself on a concert platform, what happens to us during the
deepest moments of such concentrated rapt attention? Do we not actually drop
the entire load of our own personal memories, ambitions or anxieties, hopes
or fears and thus stand aside in temporary freedom from them? Is this not a
practical if involuntary and temporary achievement of that philosophical
attitude?
Admittedly no one wishes to lose the sense of 'I-ness' - this powerful
instinct which is the driving force back of all animate Nature. We have yet
to see a single case where those who denounce the ego as a fiction and
disbelieve in its existence, act upon their belief. From the meanest worm to
the highest mammal, every one loves his own existence. Why not? Why should
we pretend to be other than what we are; why should we prate of desiring to
lose our self or prattle of its unreality and non-existence, when we cannot
get away from it even if we wish to? Every living thing, whatsoever has the
faintest trace of consciousness within it, feels this deep desire: "1 want
to exist. 1 want to live."
But the mistake it makes is the failure to comprehend that to satisfy this
intense craving it is not necessary to cling only to the limited and
fragmentary form of self with which it is acquainted, for it can receive
full satisfaction only when it lets the latter go and reaches towards the
perfect being that is its inmost essence. If we think down deeply enough, we
shall see that even the desire to give up selfishness is itself prompted by
a subtler selfishness and motivated by a nobler egoism. We may put aside the
'me' but we cannot get rid of the 'I'. We can however expand its
circumference. We can also deepen its centre. More, life cannot ask of us
and yet let us remain in the kingdom of man.
The personality is indeed 'I' but it is not the ultimate 'I'. For we are not
selfish enough! The trouble is not that self is merely an illusion, as some
claim, but that our present knowledge of it is only a broken fragment which
has still to be supplemented and completed. It is wiser to possess firm
faith in the infinite resources behind self and not waste time decrying its
present life as purely phantasmagorical. A man is not to be blamed for
acting upon self-interest. This is natural. He is to be blamed for failing
to see that he is taking only a surface-view. Just as the many little wheels
of a great machine are unaware of the general direction in which the machine
itself is moving, so the great multitudes of men are unaware of the general
direction of all this cosmic activity, wherein every incarnation is a
movement from the less to the more, a minor stage in man's major quest of
the Overself.
We barely know our self; we clutch a mere surface-fragment of it and remain
content. We do not live but merely keep alive. We fulfil our own being only
when we enter into this higher self. God's deputy to us being the Overself,
it should constitute our supreme value, that which is most worth while in
life. Loyalty to this larger self is not mere sentimentality but practical
wisdom. Selfishness is simply the ignorant opposition of the limited
personality against its proper and superior self. If we have the courage to
pull the bleeding roots of this opposition out of our own nature without
waiting for karmic experience to do it for us, we may advance to the next
and higher stage at a bound.
The 'me' which recognizes and submits to this truth, the 'I' which is
educated to keep to its proper place and not to claim a higher one, the ego
which perceives that its existence although a distinct one is not a separate
one, the personality which is willing to be ensouled and inbreathed by this
impersonal being of the Overself, will then become purified of its own
littleness. Henceforth it will be an unhindered channel for a power, light
and being superior to its own. Hence forth the individual will enter into a
sacred union with the cosmic will.
Now, because the World-Mind is everywhere present, every individual entity
partakes of its life and consciousness through its ray the Overself to
however small a degree. Nobody is ever inwardly separate from it however
outwardly distinct from it. We dwell with it in a mystic togetherness, in a
secret continuum. The recognition of our intimate relations with the
World-Mind brings a new interest into the dullest life and provides a fresh
urge to the weariest one. The ultimate mental essence of all the multitudes
of human beings, despite their varieties, diversities and differences, is
through the Overself a shared existence. On this view, life becomes an
enterprise rich with significance, for we are privileged co-partners with
Deity? And not merely the puppet automatons of Deity. Here indeed is a
thought which gives height to a man.
Thus it is for man himself to rise into the grade of philosopher and make
his partnership a conscious relation instead of an unconscious and stunted
one as it is at present. When we can comprehend what life is seeking to
achieve in us, then the universe will cease to oppress us and become more
acceptable. An important value of such a message is the peace which the
larger outlook brings through bringing a proper proportion to human outlook.
So long as the surface self torments itself unendingly with unsatisfied and
unsatisfiable desires, which experience in death both their final and worst
frustration; so long as it oscillates excitedly in time only to be given
ironically its own final quietus by time itself; so long does it display
ignorance of its true relation to its own hidden source.
When we can lift ourself to this higher standpoint, rebellion against life
as it is dies down. We learn the wonder - for it is nothing less - of total
acceptance and learning, widen out such peace as may already have become
ours. And if we share in the activity of the World-Mind we share also to
some degree in its wonderful possibilities. Not that the ray can become more
than it is - a representative of the sun on earth - but that it can draw
from that which pervades it the affirmation of its divine quality.
We not only need a purpose in life; it must also be a satisfying purpose;
and what could be more satisfying than such a sacred co-partnership?
When we understand that the World-Mind is the basis of all existence; when
we realize that it is the sustaining and uniting principle of our own self
as well as of all other selves, our prayer and our efforts will henceforth
be for the welfare of all creatures, not merely for our own. For we will
know that in the universal good our personal good will necessarily be also
included whereas if we selfishly seek our personal good alone the derisive
irony is that we shall fail to attain it. Our duty is to consider ourself
not only as a part living for its own sake but also as a part living for the
sake of the Whole.
Put into plainer language this simply means that if men were to consider the
welfare of the All as well as their own (for they are not excluded from the
All) they would gain greatly for this attitude would bring more and not less
happiness. They practise selfishness because they honestly believe such to
be the way to satisfaction; they disdain to consider the common welfare
because they honestly believe such to be the way to the loss of happiness;
but when their ignorance is removed they discover that satisfaction is
ultimately rooted not in the person alone but rather there where all persons
may meet in a common centre. For they all share the greater life of God who
is in each of them as a unity and not as something which has been broken up
into little pieces. Mankind's interest includes their own as the larger of
two concentric circles includes the lesser one.
The contrast between 'I' and 'you,' the differences between one man and
another are plain and clear: it is consequently natural for both to accept
the reasonable conclusion of their separateness. What both do not see
however is that the same powerful misapprehension, the same suggestive force
which prevents them becoming conscious of the ultimate reality behind the
world's multiformed appearances also prevents them becoming conscious of the
ultimate unity which in the end lies between their separateness from each
other.
When the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of all existence is
grasped, the quest of a purely individual salvation is seen to be an
illusory one. 'I am to be saved not for my own sake alone but because all
are to be saved': this is the proper attitude we should adopt. We can now
begin to understand what Jesus meant when he uttered the words: "Whosoever
will save his life shall lose it." For this wider self, which was the
Christ-principle in Jesus, is the secret thread which ties man to man. It
also offers the scientific basis of Jesus' beneficent injunction: "Love thy
neighbour as thyself." It lives in the 'I' as the latter itself lives in the
body. We can begin to understand too what Paul meant when he pronounced that
truly mystical sentence: "I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me". The
Overself is indeed the Cosmic Christ to which we are silently called to
dedicate our lesser existence.
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