<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=WINDOWS-1252">
<title>-034_THE CENTRAL CONSCIOUSNESS.htm</title>
</head>
<div align="center">
	<table border="0" cellpadding="6" style="border-collapse: collapse" width="100%">
<tr>
	<td>
<p class="paracenter">THE CENTRAL CONSCIOUSNESS
</p>
<p class="paracenter"></p>
<p class="para"> Very often this was the 
experience: union with the Supreme is established, but as soon as the 
consciousness was about to settle and merge in the bliss of the union, it was 
called back and had to turn to the outside world to the ordinary affairs of 
ordinary consciousness. As if I was given to understand that it was not for me 
to forget and reject the life of the physical world and pass into the Beyond, 
but to maintain the contact, the closest contact, between this world and the 
Beyond and hold both together in one consciousness. The process is somewhat like 
this: you withdraw the consciousness from the world outside and turn inward; you 
withdraw even from your own physical activities and physical perceptions; you 
withdraw further in this way step by step through all the grades of life 
movements and mental movements, go deep inward and high upward till you reach 
the highest summit: the absolute silence and indivisible unity with the 
immutable single reality. This was the aim and, generally, the end of all the 
greatest spiritual disciplines of the past. We too have to possess this 
realisation; but for us, it is the basis, the indispensable basis,
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-108</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">no doubt, all the same it is the starting-point. Sri Aurobindo 
has always said that our yoga begins where other yogas end. For what we aim at 
is not merely the attainment of the summit reality, the consciousness beyond, 
but to bring it down, make it a living and actual reality in the physical world. 
The older yogas intended to save the world, but accomplished only the salvation 
of the individual, one's own self, by passing beyond the world, realising the 
supreme Spirit and Truth and never coming back. Thus the world remained what it 
has ever been: only a few escaped out of it. Our yoga enters its crucial phase, 
its characteristic and its most difficult turn, when it seeks to bring down the 
highest consciousness once realised on the heights and make it enter into the 
life of the world and fix it there as the permanent possession of earthly life.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> The key is to find the poise 
where both the extremes meet, the junction of the two levels of consciousness, 
the transcendent and the manifested, where the two not only do not contradict or 
oppose each other, but are aspects or modes of the same Truth, indissolubly 
united and unified. It is just the border-line, the last point of the manifested 
world and the first point of the Unmanifest (as one goes upward). If you are 
able to find the point you have not to make a choice between two 
irreconcilables, either the Brahman or
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-109</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">the world. It is only when you miss the point that you are 
forced to the choice: some choose the other side of the border, the static 
consciousness, the eternal immutable pure being, self-absorbed and 
self-sufficient; others who dare not do that, turn to the world and remain 
entangled and drowned in its darkness, ignorance, travail, undelight, impotency 
and misery. But, as I have said, this is not the necessary or inevitable 
solution—if solution it is at all—of the enigma.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> The first condition, however, to 
arrive at the crucial or synthetic state of consciousness (which is, in fact, 
the basic supramental consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo calls it) is the 
realisation that the world, that is to say, physical consciousness does not 
exist by itself. By itself, it is nothing. As the Prayer says, &quot;it knows 
nothing, it can do nothing, it is nothing.&quot; This realisation must not be merely 
a mental perception, a perception in the inner consciousness alone; but the 
body, the physical existence itself must be conscious and in that consciousness 
see and experience the truth that by itself it is a void, non-existence: 
it becomes so however only to find that it is real, supremely real when it is 
suffused with its true substance, when it is the embodiment or vehicle of the 
supramental consciousness.
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-110</p>
	</td>
</tr>
	</table>
</div>
</html>
