Space-Infinity
Anything is abstract to
our ordinary perception unless it is graspable by our senses. Space
also becomes a physical reality if it can be understood in terms of
magnitude. Our senses are used to perceive physical space being
occupied by material forms. We are also used to exceptions where a
physical space is not occupied by anything—a vacuum.
However, Existence is not
solely material. There are
(a)
subtle,
non-material forms, and
(b)
subtle,
non-physical space.
The Indian spiritual
realisation is that Existence is ONE but has myriad manifestations.
This means that Reality is simultaneously one in essence but
multi-dimensional in presentation. The corollary that follows is
that though in essence ‘Space’ is the same everywhere, it is also
manifested as ‘spaces’ that hold different planes of
“consciousness’. There is a physical space that holds the
material plane of consciousness. There is a cognitive space that
holds the mental plane of consciousness. There is a vital or
life-energy space that holds our emotional repertoire. There is also
a soul-space (called chidakasa in Sanskrit) that holds our
soul-entity or Psychic Being.
Indian seers, in their
pursuit of Reality, experienced that ‘Consciousness’ per se could
break the limits of individual experience and extend into cosmic and
transcendental dimensions. As a corollary, ‘Space’ also
experientially broke all conceptual constraints and extended to
‘infinity’. In fact, ‘space’ and ‘consciousness’ became formulations
that conceptually existed in and occupied each other. Space
transcended the grasp of individual senses and cognition to a
‘interminable extension’ – to an ‘infinity which
seems to us the same all-containing all-pervading point without
magnitude’. (The Life Divine, pg 83)
This infinity may
experientially appear to be empty, without consciousness and this is
the psychological basis of describing Reality as a Nihil or Zero in
certain metaphysical traditions. But if at one poise the infinity
appears as a zero or a Non-Being that cannot support anything, at
another poise it is also experienced in a positive way as a Being
that is ‘the free base of all cosmic existence’. Actually, what we
perceive as a zero is an indefinable infinite as it surpasses all
our cognitive constructions. ‘ And this conflict
of terms , so violent, yet accurately expressive of something we do
perceive, shows that mind and speech have passed beyond their
natural limits and are striving to express a Reality in which their
own conventions and necessary oppositions disappear into an
ineffable identity’. (Ibid, pg 83-84)
Time-Eternity
The Absolute Existence has
also been experientially perceived as ‘timeless’-- to be of ‘an
eternal duration’. The same Reality which is experienced as timeless
can also be perceived in a moment impregnated with the right
consciousness. It is possible for an individual to enter into the
consciousness of eternity by shifting one’s poise from the dimension
of movement to the dimension of immobility, to ‘an eternity
which seems to us the same all-containing ever-new moment.’(Ibid, pg
83).
Time is experienced as
movement, as motion, as change, as progress. The planets are in
motion as much as the human mind is in motion. Movement is a thing
that is studied by science and metaphysics with equal vigor. If
science cannot conceive anything beyond movement, a section of
metaphysicians also consider movement to be the only reality.
Sri Aurobindo admits that
it is conceptually very difficult to go behind the movement of
succession and change in time (It is comparatively easier to achieve
a psychological extension beyond a conceptual space): ‘We are and
the world is a movement that continually progresses and increases by
the inclusion of all the successions of the past in a present which
represents itself to us as the beginning of all the successions of
the future, --a beginning, a present that always eludes us because
it is not, for it has perished before it is born’. (Ibid, pg 86)
In fact, to some minds, change is the only reality and ‘continuity’ is
perceived as a conceptual illusion .Sri Aurobindo quips that then
there would be no such thing as duration of Time or coherence of
consciousness—‘A man’s steps as he walks or runs or leaps are
separate, but there is something that takes the steps and makes the
movement continuous’.(Ibid,footnote,pg86)
The movement in time is
such a strong formulation that often the eternally successive
movement and change in ‘Time’ is considered as the sole Absolute
Reality. In other words, it is not BEING but BECOMING that is
considered to be the Reality. Sri Aurobindo however considers this
to be a partial experience: ‘But there is a supreme experience
and supreme intuition by which we go back behind our surface self
and find that this becoming, change, succession are only a mode
of our being and that there is that in us which is not
involved at all in the becoming. Not only can we
have the intuition of
this that is stable and eternal in us, not only can we have the
glimpse of it in experience behind the veil of continually fleeting
becomings, but we can draw back into it and live in it entirely, so
effecting an entire change in our external life, …it is pure
existence, eternal, infinite, indefinable, not affected by the
succession of Time, not involved in the extension of Space, beyond
form, quantity, quality, --Self only and absolute…. We have
therefore two fundamental facts of pure existence and of
world-existence, a fact of Being, a fact of Becoming. To deny one or
the other is easy; to recognize the facts of consciousness and find
out their relation is the true and fruitful wisdom’. (Ibid, pg
86-87)
The Individual in Eternity
The individual finds it
difficult to experience the spaceless and timeless Absolute because
of the ego. But the Absolute ‘surpasses infinitely our ego or
any ego or any collectivity of egos..’(Ibid, pg80) The
individual is tiny and petty in comparison to the Absolute yet the
ego thinks and acts as if it were the centre of the universe. But
the individual too is equally important, only it has to find its
right value by replacing the ego by a principle through which Truth
can be realized:
‘At present we keep a
false account. We are infinitely important to the All, but to us the
All is negligible; we alone are important to ourselves. This is the
sign of the original ignorance which is the root of the ego, that it
can only think with itself as centre as if it were the All, and of
that which is not itself accepts only so much as it is mentally
disposed to acknowledge or as it is forced to recognize by the
shocks of its environment. Even when it begins to philosophise, does
it not assert that the world only exists in and by its
consciousness? Its own state of consciousness or mental standards
are to it the test of reality; all outside its orbit or view tends
to become false or non-existent. This mental self-sufficiency of man
creates a system of false accountantship which prevents us from
drawing the right and full value from life. There is a sense in
which these pretensions of the human mind and ego repose on a truth,
but this truth only emerges when the mind has learned its ignorance
and the ego has submitted to the All and lost in it its separate
self-assertion. To recognize that we, or rather the results and
appearances we call ourselves, are only a partial movement of this
infinite Movement and that it is that infinite which we have to
know, to be consciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the
commencement of true living. To recognize that in our true selves we
are one with the total movement and not minor or subordinate is the
other side of the account, and its expression in the manner of our
being, thought, emotion and action is necessary to the culmination
of a true or divine living. (Ibid, pg81-82)
The finite and the
infinite are two poises of the same Reality. The formless is
represented in the form, the moment is poised in eternity:
The Infinitesimal Infinite
Out of a still Immensity we came!
These million universes were to it to it
The poor light-bubbles of a
trivial game,game,
A fragile glimmer in the
Infinite.nite.
It could not find its soul in all
that vast:vast:
It drew itself into a little
speckspeckspeck
Infinitesimal, ignobly cast
Out of earth’s mud and slime
strangely awake,-
A tiny plasm upon a casual globe
In the small system of a
dwarflike sun, sun,
A little life wearing the flesh for
robe,
A little mind winged through wide space to run! run! run!
It lived, it knew, it saw its self
sublime,
Deathless, outmeasuring Space ,
outlasting Time.
(Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, pg138)
Date of Update:
15-May-12
- By Dr. Soumitra Basu
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