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<P ALIGN=center style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b>
<font size="4">Lone
to the Lone</font></b></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">THE
quintessence of spirituality is said to consist in, as has been
described in the famous phrase of the Alexandrine mystic philosopher
Plotinus, <I>the flight of the lone to the lone. </I>God is a
solitary and the other solitary is the soul: so when one solitary
mingles with the supreme solitary, the result is utter solitariness,
which is spirituality at its apex, its highest height. The world, in
this view, is an excrescence, an epiphenomenon – Illusion, Maya.
God is the transcendent Reality, above and beyond all manifestation,
negating all multiplicities and relativities of creation: He is
indivisible, single, absolute unity – <I>ekamev<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>dvit<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">ī</FONT>yam,
kevalam – neha n<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>n<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>sti
kincana. </I>The human being too is not in reality the individual
person bounded within a body, life and mind formation, standing in
reciprocal relations with such other formations; his inner core of
truth and substance is a unitary centre of <I>consciousness –
angusthami<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>tra purusah, - which </I>is
aloof and apart from his apparent and assumed personality and has no
dealings with such personalities. God has no <I>up<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>dhi,
</I>phenomenal qualification, neither has the soul of man. Therefore
in his spiritual aspiration, man has to divest himself of all the
outer growths that cover and bury his soul: with the clear unmixed
vision of his pure soul he has to look straight into the face of the
Divine Transcendent, shredded too of its cosmic vesture, and rise
from the station of ignorance, this level ground. of clay to which it
is pinned, and soar and fly and merge into the pure reality of the
pure Spirit. Therefore it is said, naked we come into the vale of
tears and naked we have to go back to our home. Or in terms of
another imagery, it is the pure pouring into the pure, the full
mixing&quot;into the full.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.58cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>Some
mystics and philosophers recently come into vogue</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 361</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>(inspired or
encouraged by the Christian or the Buddhist way of Realisation) have
emphasised this outlook. But it has also been counterbalanced by
another way of spiritual growth and fulfilment: we may call it the
modern way, for it has been a pronounced characteristic of the modern
consciousness. We referred in our previous essay to the
Existentialist who has attracted so much attention in these days, the
linchpin of whose philosophy is the value of the individual person,
especially the individual personal in relation to each other.
Kierkegaard, the Danish mystic, from whom this school is supposed to
originate, speaks of the Absolute as the Single One that excludes and
annuls all &quot;others&quot;, the crowd. He lays especial emphasis
upon complete solitariness and total renunciation as the very
condition, <I>sine qua non, </I>of the soul's spiritual journey and
yet characterises the <I>singleness </I>of the one in terms that make
of it an essential whole, an integer. Man must isolate himself from
his phenomenal being, certainly – as the <I>neti neti </I>formula
enjoins – but also he must first find or become his real self,
realise his true individuality before he can reach God, the Divine
Self, identify himself with the Transcendent. It is only a freely and
truly formed individual being that can give itself to the Divine or
become one with it. This true individuality is indeed a solitary
being away and apart from the crowd of personalities that surround it
– it has been called by the Indian mystics, the Purusha in the
heart, no bigger than the thumb, the Dwarf Godhead <I>(V<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>mana).</I></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.41cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>When
one is a member of the crowd, he has no personality or individuality,
he is an amorphous mass, moving helplessly in the current of life,
driven by Nature-force as it pleases her: spiritual life begins by
withdrawing oneself from this flow of Ignorance and building up or
taking cognisance of one's true person and being. When one possesses
oneself integrally, is settled in the armature of one's spirit self,
he has most naturally turned away from the inferior personalities of
his own being and the comradeship also of people in bondage and
ignorance. But then one need not stop at this purely negative poise:
one can move up and arrive at a positive status, a new revaluation
and reaffirmation. For when the divine selfhood is attained, one is
no longer sole or solitary. Indeed, the solitariness or loneliness
that is attributed to the spiritual status is a human</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 362</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>way of
viewing the experience: that is the impression left on the normal
mind consciousness when the Purusha soars out of it, upwards from the
life of the world to the life of the Spirit. But the soul, the true
spiritual being in the individual, is not and cannot be an isolated
entity; the nature of the spiritual consciousness is first
transcendence, no doubt, transcendence of the merely temporal and
ephemeral, but it is also universalisation, that is to say, the
cosmic realisation that has its classic expression in the famous
mantra of the Gita, <I>he who sees himself in other selves and other
selves in his own self. </I>In that status &quot;own&quot; and
&quot;other&quot; are not distinct or contrary things, but aspects of
the one and the same reality, different stresses in one rhythm.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.44cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>The
flight then represents the freedom, the movement in height of the
soul; but there is also the other, the horizontal movement leading to
expansiveness and comprehension. One is transcendental, the other
global or cosmic. First we have to reject, reject the false
formations one by one (sheath by sheath, as it is described in the
Upanishads) and arrive at the purest core of truth and reality; but
again we have to come back, take up a new, the true formation. What
was renounced has to be reintegrated in the divine becoming. While we
are in Ignorance, our relations with men and the world are false and,
ignorant, but once we attain our true self, we find the same self in
men and things and we have no more revulsion for them –<I> tato na
vijigupsate.</I></FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 363</FONT></P>
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