Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Arguments to The Life Divine
Chapter XXIV. Matter
ARGUMENT
Life and Mind are in the fact of evolution conditioned
by the body and therefore by the principle of Matter. The body is the chief
difficulty in the way of a spiritual transformation of life; it has therefore
been regarded by spiritual aspiration as an enemy and the escape from the
material existence has been made an indispensable condition of the final
emancipation. – The quarrel begins with the struggle between Life and Matter
with the apparent defeat of life in death as its constant circumstance; it
continues with the struggle of the Mind against the life and the body and
culminates with the struggle of the spirit against all its instruments; but the
right end and solution of these discords is not an escape and a severance but
the complete victory of the higher over the lower. – We have to examine the
problem of the reality of Matter. Our present experience of Matter does not give
us its truth; for Matter is only an appearance of the Reality, a form of its
force-action presented to the principle of sense in the universal consciousness.
As Mind is only a final dividing action of Supermind and Life of Conscious-Force
working in the conditions of the Ignorance, so Matter as we know it is only the
final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that same working. Mind
precipitating itself into Life to create form gives to the universal principle
of Being the appearance of material substance instead of pure substance, that is
to say, of substance offering itself to the contact of mind as a stable thing or
object. This contact of mind with its object is Sense. – In the divine Mind
there is a movement which presents to the divine Knower the forms of Himself as
objects to His knowledge and this would create a division between the Knower and
the object of knowledge if there were not at the same time, inevitably, another
movement by which He feels the object as
Himself. This movement, in the divided state of existence created by dividing
Mind, is represented to us as the contact of sense which becomes a basis for
contact through the thought-mind by which we return towards unity. – Since the
action of Mind is to divide infinitely the one infinite existence, Matter, the
result of that action, becomes in its apparent nature an infinite atomic
division and atomic aggregation of infinite substance. But its reality is one
and indivisible, even as is the reality of Life and of Mind. Matter is
Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of
objective knowledge, action and delight.
Himself. This movement, in the divided state of existence created by dividing
Mind, is represented to us as the contact of sense which becomes a basis for
contact through the thought-mind by which we return towards unity. – Since the
action of Mind is to divide infinitely the one infinite existence, Matter, the
result of that action, becomes in its apparent nature an infinite atomic
division and atomic aggregation of infinite substance. But its reality is one
and indivisible, even as is the reality of Life and of Mind. Matter is
Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of
objective knowledge, action and delight.