Prof. G.R. Malkani undertakes to justify
Mayavada as part and parcel of Advaita in
the Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 18
(p.221) and in this connection, he
states that his justification of this
doctrine was prompted by his reading of
the Life Divine, of Sri
Aurobindo. Obviously his first complaint
is that all those who attacked Mayavada
accused it without taking into
consideration its birth and growth under
the shadowing wings of Advaita or
Monism.
He pleads that a system must satisfy the following
criteria in order to satisfy him. The first condition is that it must
be
grounded in and justified by our experience so that there is nothing in it that
transcends our experience. He naively adds ‘ after all we can only interpret
this experience and not speculate about things that fall outside our
experience.’ (p. 222). Let me first of all point out what he really means by
this test. First and foremost, he rules out any experience that transcends his
present experience, his limited conscience, if we may so call this overweaning
vanity of ignorance parading as experience. Secondly, he speaks of
being grounded in and justified by our experience as almost purely an
experiential affair, though, to be sure, this justification is to be sought and
the grounding is to be discovered by his very corruptive rationality or
conceptualization. Thirdly, no one denies the right of Prof Malkani to pat
himself on his back with his being so very less speculative than others who have
at least the wisdom to admit their limits.
The second test is not serious and
indeed is welcome. No system must have
‘internal incoherence or instability’.
Now even here the second term very much
recalls a metaphysical reference to
toppling from a table when placed in
unstable position. We shall show that
Mayavada itself is a very unstable
thing, and its coherence with Reality is
intolerably difficult, not to speak of
its being simply unacceptable and
intolerable.
The third criterion is that no problem
should be left unsolved. Now the
fundamental truth of Mayavada rests on
inexplicability of any problem, and
there is nothing for it to solve, for
all is a mighty mysterious illusion.
What problems can remain before this
grand disaster? Unanswered they ever
will remain.
The fourth and the last criterion is
‘There must be nothing hypothetical
about its truth; for a philosophical
truth cannot be verified. It must be
absolutely certain and self-evidently
true. This is only possible when the
certainty is both rational and
intuitive’ (p.222). This last is a very
fine sample of the kind of argumentation
that pervades the thesis of Prof. G.R.
Malkani. First let me start with the
last sentence. The certainty of the
system must be both rational and
intuitive. Now is it the rational or the
intuitive experience that falls within
our competence? Further are rational and
intuitive apprehensions of
reality mutually contradictory or
complementary? Does not the evidence of
reason contradict the evidence of
intuition? If they are complementary or
supplementary, then, is not the figment
of Mayavada, a construction, a
conceptual construction, itself negated?
The world as objective is stated to be a
conceptual fiction-an illusion: What is
the experience that brought it about? Is
not our experience itself of the sensory
level or intuitive level and not of the
rational level. If philosophy is of the
rational level which contradicts the
evidence of the senses and intuition, is
not a system conceptually erected on
what might be called coherency of
concepts a ghost-frame work? Is not
philosophy then itself impossible even
as the mayavada that has been brought
into existence by such a philosophy is
impossible? Is there any possibility of
self-evidence to intuition? If intuition
has to legislate for reason how can the
learned professor seek the help of
something that he states to be akin to
delusion or mysticism? At least Sri
Sankara was more aware of the need for
the super-rational intuitive as the
final arbiter of philosophical intuition
than the pseudo-attempts made to
reconcile the relational
savikalpaka-jnana, and the
unrelational aparoksa-jnana,
which made one directly aware of Reality
as the entire One indivisible
experience, super-sensory,
super-discriminatory. The self-evidence
of Reality is the direct exhibition of
its totality in intuition, which
includes a powerful annihilation of all
differences of subject and object and
revels in Supreme Spiritual subjectivity
of Oneness, Plurality as separate
existences ceases on its attainment.
Having thus shown that Prof. Malkani’s
four axioms of Advaita are open to
serious internal incoherence, I shall
then see what are his justifications.
First, Prof. Malkani takes up the
question of our knowledge of the
external world. He sees that the
prima facie refutation of Mayavada consists
in pointing out that since all is
Brahman without external or internal
difference, the very fact of the
existence of something called the world
or its explanation the Maya is a
secondary fact that impugns the
sovereign unity of the One Brahman.
Thus there results a dualism worse
indeed in some respects that the
original dualism of Spirit and World. He
answers, ‘we never know the world at
all, all the time we have been knowing
only Brahman alone.’ We merely
conceive it. Reality is what we
know but the world we only
conceive. Lest we should ask the
question as to what difference is there
between knowing and conceiving, he
answers that knowing is absolutely
immediate to consciousness or coincides
with it, whereas conception is that
which is outside consciousness and
distinct from it. He proceeds to point
out that consciousness alone, can be
utterly coincident with itself and
therefore reality is consciousness. The
thesis so established firstly seeks to
make ‘knowing’ some thing of immediate
intuition; but this goes further and
makes out that Reality is not known at
all, for nothing as such remains. Of
course mentists are not baffled by this
non-existence of Reality other than
their consciousness. The primary
question is firstly why conceptualizing?
Secondly, why Outside
Consciousness? Even if conceptualizing
cannot stand by itself, and therefore
must have a consciousness to support it
and can only stand as a Self, how did it
ever arrive at that outsideness and
objectivity? These things are not
answered, and Prof Malkani quietly says,
“there is nothing forced about this
view”. Surely what else but forced is a
view which forces concepts to be outside
the self or consciousness, though this
equation of consciousness as self itself
is something of a mystery unexplained in
the exposition: “The author however
leads us to quite a different topic in
order to prove that conceptions or
perceptions never fall apart from
the self (p.225).
Having found that conceptions and
perceptions do not fall apart from the
self if we sufficiently go back in
time in our experience, he concludes the
world never existed because the truth is
that there is no self and no conception.
Indeed there are no knowings.
Silence is the Truth. If after so much
laborious argumentation this mouse came
into existence (or non-existence?) why
deny the charge leveled against them
that they are nihilists or ajativadins?
And why try to prove this with
the help of a repertory of useless
dialectics? Prof. Malkani again says
that ‘a dualism to us need not be
a dualism in reality’ feeling
perhaps certain qualms of conscience at
having to give up his job any way of
being a philosopher. And uncertainly he
seeks to bridge the gulf between the
human and the Real standpoints, with the
hope, - anent the first axiom of his
system-building criteria-that the Real
is something that falls within his
experience, though he himself, to be
sure, is a conceptualization of some
reality which he conceptually professes
to understand, and ill. The truth is
grasped by Prof. Malkani when he writes,
“No amount of juggling with thought can
succeed in eliminating all dualism” (225
p.). Do we forget that the fourth axiom
stated that when we feel uncomfortable
with reason that distinguishes and
discriminates and analyses we should
have recourse to intuition to support
and save not reality, but us, from utter
damnation? Unfortunately the problem of
the many to be reconciled in unity or
oneness refuses to be solved as he
wishes. Damn it: let us like Canute say:
“It shall not be”. That satisfies our
conceit – the conceit of Reality; the
soul of man has become the Superman, the
One, without a second!
Then, having prefaced this wonderful
Reality-exposition, as above, Prof.
Malkani finds that Maya must have a
reason! There is something contained in
the concept of Maya that came to explain
of existence of duality or manyness.
“The opposition between Brahman and the
cosmos of our experience has to be
resolved; and it is resolved through the
concept in question. But does this
concept successfully achieve this
result?” asks Prof. Malkani (p.227). or
does it refute itself or does it add to
his griefs?*
The whole contention of even
advaitically-minded schools of
philosophy is that Mayavada is not a
satisfactory instrument for the purposes
for which it was devised, and therefore
the advaita can exist without the
acceptance or even through a refutation
of it. Firstly let us see what are its
benefits.
(i)
We contend that the world is not
made at all. It is simply a product
of illusion. Maya is the name for this
illusion, the illusion of
Brahman appearing as the world. It is
ultimate irrationality.
(ii)
Either the world is real to us or
the Brahman but never the two
simultaneously. The illusory never is.
(iii)
Maya can be a power in a general
sense in which an illusion is a power.
But Maya has not created or produced the
illusion. We cannot say there is
illusion because there is Maya.
*
Life Divine Vol. 1, p. 261.
1
The distinction between making and
producing is a rather knotty one and is
hidden under the cloak of these two
synonyms which mean the same activity.
Then follow these questions: “Can we not
explain this illusion in some way? Can
we not go beyond it?” to which he
answers, “We contend that we cannot.”
However he contends also in the same
breath that we can go beyond illusory
appearance. Then follow a series of
propositions which hinge round this
getting out of the illusory appearance,
which are all due to the
ultimate irrationality (p.229), which he
straight away equates with the avarna and
vikshepa, avidya, upadhi etc.,
all those entities which make diversity
possible. And with quiet resignation is
uttered the words, “Beyond this we
cannot go” (p.229,230).
Then he begins begging the question that
has been at issue, how and why did the
individual superimpose the quality of
self-hood upon the non-self, why should
there be illusion in the ever
infinite consciousness, the so called
asraya and vishaya of itself?
To this question alone was an answer
demanded, and it is evaded by saying
that it is a mystery or fundamental
irrationality. ‘Beyond that we cannot
go’.
No one denied that the reality behind
everything is Brahman, the support of
all things is in Him, and by Him are all
kept in their appointed places. By
denying the individual soul or the
reality of the world we have not untied
the knot nor ‘dissolved’ it by any means
(p.231). The learned professor has
debunked it..
The imputation of ignorance to all the
pramanas does not avail. The precise
process or manner of the deepening of
the self in each or the ‘perception’
(very uncomfortable word that for an
advaitin to use) of the self within
which cancels the world and ourselves
certainly presupposes the two-fold
knowledge of present ignorance and the
truth, simultaneously, even if
this simultaneity be only for a moment.
Indeed Advaita has found it necessary in
actual practice to accept the period of
simultaneous experience of illusion and
reality to be considerable-as witnessed
to by its postulation of
badhitanuvritti.
The problems of error as fact, error as
ajnana, and that illusion is not
nothing but that is really resolves into
its ground, are then discussed, and not
always happily, because the confusion
reigns in the mind of Prof. Malkani that
knowledge is not awareness, that
knowledge is relational and
infected with error, a position which we
shall have to remember as inconsistent
with his thesis, that knowledge or
knowing is immediate absolutely (p.223).
Finally with a gusto declares Prof.
Malkani: ‘Maya! There is no Maya and no
problem of Maya’! (p.238).
It is a thin defence but the best
possible under the circumstances
perhaps; it could have been done better,
if only he were loyal to Sankara who at
least did not make reason an
ultimate arbiter, though he shewed that
reason could only demolish and it is
intuition that could grant. Advaita monistics
is intellectual, incurably intellectual;
and an inverted intellectuality pervades
it; for it makes the real world a
conceptual creation, and the primal
cause which it has discovered as the
truth of its intuition, the
transcendent, it makes into an
unattainable unknowable substrate, and
as such also a conceptual entity.
Maya is the concretizing force it has
recourse to, but this, true to its main
purpose, it makes into an element of
complete and utter irrationality or
unintelligibility, since, for Prof.
Malkani, it does not explain illusion;
it explains not itself, and it can be of
no help to Brahman, the sole existent;
it cannot explain emergence. It had
never been and therefore why talk about
it?
Then, that is, after having to his own
satisfaction established the
non-existence and non-problem of Maya,
having after all thought that Maya yet
is something to be talked about, he
proceeds to answer the objections raised
against this non-existent problem. We
may well remark that it is he who found
a convenient inexplicable peg to hang
his brand of advaita, not we, and he
cannot get away with its argumentation
about its ‘unlimited’ or penultimate
existence or reality. We have every
right to ask whether the reality that is
awareness is an existence or not, is it
or is it not. No recourse to two
standpoints in reference to the same
thing is available, for its
self-contradiction is patent on the face
of it. He now begins answering
objections.
The
first objectionn
“If Brahman is the only reality why
speak of Maya at all? But if we have to
admit the principle of Maya in order to
explain out present experience, there
will always be some form of
ultimate dualism. Maya will have some
relation to Brahman.” (p.238)
Prof. Malkani begins with the preface
that thought can start with some kind of
dualism, and admits otherwise it has no
scope. He speaks immediately about
planes. Are there planes in Brahman or
in us and if in us or in anything else
why are they? He says that it is the
fault of philosophizing itself. Of
course no body expects one to jump over
one’s own shadow. Naively comes the
sentence: “Maya (the problem) is the
end of all problems” – rather we do not
see any end to it. But no sooner he says
this than he recovers his philosophical
judgment and remarks “Maya is an entity
which is real only in the absence of
discriminating thought”. Well may one
exclaim, where are we going to? Thought
is essentially dualistic; yet only
without thought can we see that maya is
an end of all problems; and now maya is
refuted by thought. Thought indeed walks
in three paces to suit the logical
incoherency of the three planes. But then what can be
coherent in this world? The second
criterion (that of coherency) is
crashing on us and is being swallowed up
by the fastest running river in the
ravine. “Surely the concept of maya is
liquidating itself and all dualism.” The
naivity is all the more true to type,
constant throughout, “And there is no
forced logic about it.” “the maya stands
fully revealed to thought in its true
nature when it is described as “anirvachaniya”.
The whole argument is a sample of the
incoherency of the structure of thought
raised by the learned professor. An
omnibus-howl that there is no problem;
incomprehensibility is something that
stands revealed, acceptance of
Ignorance of true nature is
understanding; - these are all of a
piece with the attitude that does not
see that the whole approach to the
problem of Unity. Multiplicity has
misfired, and this cussedness pervades
the entire thesis so efficiently carried
out in its presentation as in its
defence.
The
second objection: “The
world cannot be all an illusion. The
illusory is never really known to us but
merely conceived. The world is not
merely conceived by us. It shows the
reign of law and order. It has real
objectivity…” The objection is a
consequence of the first, for it attacks
the maya-concept from the side of the
effect – the world.
Prof. Malkani admits that “Thus we have
to admit that the illusory is just like
any real object” (p.240), and proceeds
to make both the illusory objects and
the ‘so-called real’ objects conceptual
or rather a ‘construct of thought’. He
airily propounds that every thing about
the world could ultimately be traced to
thought. But is it not the thought that
taught him to discriminate?
*
Life Divine 1. " Nowhere in the
Upanishads is it actually laid down that
the three-fold status is a condition of
illusion or the creation of an unreality
; it is constantly affirmed that all
this that is, - this universe we are now
supposing to have been constructed by
Maya, - is the Brahman, the Reality."
Changing the front he may explain
that thought has two modalities (i)
constructive or creative and (ii)
discriminative analysis. He holds that
once we separate the one from the other,
we shall arrive at a stage when we shall
have no objectivity. And as we shall
have no objectivity, neither is there a
place for subjectivity. Prof. Malkani
however wants to make out that illusion,
imagination and conception are
different; but having reduced everything
to what we are not capable of ever
knowing, he assumes that perception,
conception and imagination are all of
the same kind (p. 241).
But he contends also that there is a
difference between conception and
imagination, using the so-well-known but
well-exploded myth of free-association
in the one case, and
controlled-association in the other.
This resort has already been so
thoroughly ruined by the Psycho-analytic
school which shows that free-association
is in fact an association or re-intergrative
process that takes place under the
guidance of the Unconscious and
repressed subliminal consciousness, that
we may well call our conceptualizing
more free than that; but then, even this
is impossible for the control exercised
by the unconscious or the subliminal
consciousness is of the universal
instincts, the most universal and
racial, and as such it is spurious
subjectivity that pervades the
free-association process. It appears
then that the specific conceptualization
that takes place when I conceive a chair
and not a table, the control is of the
object and not of the subject and there
is no choice left for Prof. Malkani to
call it by any other name.
Prof. Malkani here diverts himself by
describing the illusory as
consciously perceived and not
consciously imagined. The rub then
is consciousness, and not either
objectivity or imagination or
perception, and as for that
consciousness surely there can be no
imputation that it is doing havoc. But
precisely the whole complaint of
Mayavada is against this Consciousness,
this Absolute Consciousness, that does
all this tricky business of appearing
illusorily in imagination, in perception
and in conception too. This truth is, as
Sri Aurobindo has stated, and there are
weighty authorities and testimonies of
Sri Ramanuja, Sri Bhaskara, Sri Madhva,
Sri Krishna Chaitanya and a whole host
of mystics who point out that there is
absolutely no meaning in holding that
the ‘created’, ‘manifested’,
‘exhibited’, is less real than the
Uncreate, Unborn, Unmanifest,
Unexhibited or Uncreatable,
Unmanifestable, Unexhibitable, which
however does appear, does exhibit itself
to itself, so to speak. The
vivarta-vada is an expedient in a
refutation of Buddhism;
it is futile as an explanation of Vedic
and Upanishadic Intuition. The whole
doctrine of unreality of the three
states of waking dreaming and sleeping
propounded by Mayavada under the
distinguished auspices of the
Karika-kara-Gaudapada, is alien to the
structure of spiritual experience and
whatever experience is at the back of
the value theories of Mayavada, it is a
sheer disservice to the Reality of the
Supreme Consciousness, Being-Bliss.
The reply to the third objection (c)
(p.241) complains, in one word, that the
refuter of the Mayavada has
unfortunately a notion and the objector
here holds, that there are real
individuals, real knowledge and real
liberation. True, these have absolutely
no place in Advaita Mayavada indeed
there is no place therein for anything,
not even for Sachchidananda. Having
argued however that much may be said in
favour of the common-sense position
seeking a real liberation for a real
individual, he holds that freedom is not
‘change of a quality for another quality
on the part of a self-identical entity’
(p.241); for he holds that freedom is
not equivalent to changing of one
quality, that of being bound, to one of
freedom, for here there is no
modification but a dropping of
limitation. Change here is certainly not
the word to be employed except as a
general term. The whole difficulty for
Prof. Malkani is that he starts with a
very wrong use of the word ‘real’ and
refuses to see that it is leading him
and his like to the cul de sac of
perfect darkness: witness his impervious
sentence. “A real bondage could not
disappear through right knowledge, but a
false bondage must” (p.243) and perhaps
students of Mayavada will recall the
analogy of fire dying out alone with
that which burns in it applied to the
right knowledge itself; for you will
remember that real individuals, real
knowledge, and real liberation are
unacceptable to Advaita. For blatant
logic without relevance this piece is
hard to beat. But then we are in such a
world and the freedom granted to the
individual is, in the Grace of the
Divine, to be a kamacari.
The
accusing fingers of many thinkers who
are also mystics, and not any
intellectual bourgeoisie, are raised
against the advaitic view that He is
Brahman and point out that the
upasana of Aham-brahmasmi
is itself capable of being misdirected
towards the exaltation of egoism as in
the case of the mythical heroes. And the
mystical finger raised against the
school of Advaita Mayavada cannot be
rebutted unless there is the acceptance
of humility by the one who achieving
salvation of cancellation of his
existence sees not others as even
waiting to be liberated or cancelled,
though he (?) continues his high
spiritual cancellation-business
remaining out of the world. Sri
Aurobindo as a Seer-mystic lays his
unerring finger on this which Prof.
Malkani with his own brand of
self-justified consciousness(?) speaks
of as a private grievance (p.244).
Further Prof. Malkani betrays his lack
of understanding of the metaphysical
theory of Sri Aurobindo when he says
that the individual is ‘a phenomenal
existence’ and a creation of the Lord!
(footnote to page 244).
Then comes the reply to the objector
who really works out a reductio ad
absurdum by saying “If indivisible
consciousness is the only reality then
the world is not and never existed, can
never have been conceived.” “for do we
not first conceive it and then
deny it?” Now comes Prof. Malkani with
his reply; no doubt we have to accept at
the level of thought – the terms of
duality and multiplicity, - (quite a
convenient excuse for thinking in terms
of that). Then with as much dogmatism he
asserts that ‘a unity which
accommodates multiplicity can only be,
as we have shown, a spurious unity’ –
the showing as we point out at once is a
mere affirmation, not sanctioned by
logic, by experience, not even by
integral experience. This is sheer
non-sense; for the whole problem of any
metaphysics is to discover the unity,
that unity which shall not cancel but
uphold the multiplicity and make
experience possible. Abolishing is a
child’s act of solution and canceling;
sublating and other terms are but veils
of this process of a mentality which is
unable to stand up to a critical
exposition of integrity of Reality. The
fact is, it needs a painstaking effort
to understand the secret of unity,
Identity is the first-look solution and
a false solution. And ‘after all we can
only realise a real unity when we can go
with the aid of thought beyond thought
and its dualities,’ is a statement of
despair when one never makes up his
mind to go to that bleak height but goes
on rather towards excellent suppers at
professorial concerts. And Prof
Malkani’s ways of thinking, having been
seen for what they are, cannot through
any effort on his part but involve his
thinking his position to be reductio
ad asburdum. But the problem of the
one and the many is crucial, and has
other repercussions on the very
structure of society and ethics and
these are all debunked by the sweeping
phrase, Hitlerian as people will admit,
‘ Cancel’, which is another way of
saying ‘put them in the bucket’ like
puppies. And we know they cannot
survive, even the stoutest of them.
The last objection is against the
existence of Maya: Maya is, the
duality therefore is, but we can,
from what has gone before, conclude that
the explanation will be swift and surely
given Maya never is, never was, never
will be. But he allows that the whole
business is irrational, and we must of
course recognize it. After all, that is
what philosophy is out to make known,
our limits and possibilities. Surely no
one underrated the dimensions of the
task undertaken to make irrationality
respectable and even honourable. No
doubt, the Mayavadin has taken all this
trouble not for nothing but to make
thought irrational and cancel it if
possible in a super-irrational which
swallows up all the appearance, for that
is the meaning of sublation (p.237) – a
swallowing up by the ground leaving no
residue either positive or negative –
though what exactly this second
alternative means, I leave the reader to
discover. Force of habit, you know, in
dialectics!
We have arrived at intuition – an
intuition that succeeds to the throne
where intellect has failed (p.247). This
is a grand quack-business. The magic
wand has after all come and lifted us
up, our problems, our freedoms as well
as our bondages have all disappeared.
You know Intuition – it is Omnivorous.
Unfortunately there are intuitionists,
revelationists, enjoyers of God, in his
absolute Transcendence as His
supreme wonderful immanence, who having
simultaneously seen and moved and had
their being in all the Supreme Vastness,
Bliss and Reality, hold that a
superficial attraction, a false
attraction alone has been presented by
Mayavada; an attraction to the Divine so
that they may for a while withdraw their
own identifications with the world in
order to perceive the Divine
relationships. Or even when there is to
be had indeed a fundamental physical
identity realised by the individual
soul, it is not the essence of the
search; for God alone is realized as the
most perfectly absorbing Reality, and
the completest immanence in Him is seen
to be the finale or rather the most
complete realization of the union, this
being the purpose of the search with
which the soul started on its struggle
after liberation. Complete
surrender gives the fullest immanence of
oneself in the Divine in every respect,
including the loss of this egocentricism
that has marked it out as separate and
self. It then perceives what it should
ever know that as in the absorption and
this total unification which permits the
soul to be able to say ‘I am not; Thou
alone art ’ or rather ‘ I am thou ’ to
use the most pregnant usage of the
Upanishads, for ‘I no longer am or can
be divested of Thee’ and ‘Thou art all
that is I,’, so also it knows that the
vastness infinity of the Divine had
always held it to itself and in itself
in an inseparable relationship a
fundamental mystic and wonderful
unity which alone the individual soul
did not become aware of and therefore
fell into the avidya; even this avidya
is for the purpose of the Divine Essence
to enjoy Himself, in an extensity and
separation that is not separation in
essence, in the externally in separably
related souls (aprthaksiddha-sambandha).
It is equally true that the panthesism
that is sought to be arrived at by
certain thinkers is not the whole
truth about the reality; and monism can
never be considered to be anything but
an intellectual version of the deeper
unity or integral Organicistic
Personality of the Divine. So truly have
certain advaitic thinkers themselves
realized the fruitlessness of the
reasonings and so completely have
western thinkers and philosophers
exhibited with their thorough-going
consistency the goal of monism, whether
it is the Haeckelian, Hegelian,
Bergsonian or Machian kinds, to be the
outcome of the intellectual attempt to
discover the uniformities of nature,
that it is a noteworthy development when
we see them claiming that their monism
is of the intuitional order. The seven
refutations of the Mayavada made by Sri
Ramanuja give classical examples of its
shifty logic and inspired inconsistency
and they have yet to be answered fully.
Nor are the objections raised by Prof.
Malkani all that can be stated against
the school, for the orthodox have many
more objections*
Prof. Malkani wishes to point out that
Sri Aurobindo accepts indeed Maya and
whether he calls the same daivi or
apara maya, one of these answeres to
the maya of the advaita. The word Maya
is derived by Sri Aurobindo from the
root ma, measure, and higher maya
is that which ‘ exhibits’ the ‘vast
illimitable truth of infinite existence’
whilst the lower is delusive, separative
and of the ignorance. Sri Aurobindo also
accepts two levels of evolution, the
evolution in the Ignorance and the
evolution in the knowledge; the
material, vital and mental evolution are
of the Ignorance. What is precisely the
status of this Ignorance, since
‘Self-Ignorance is the root of all
perversity of our existence?’ No advaita
can accept the view, says Prof. Malkani,
that reality, the most absolute, can
ever suffer from self-ignorance not to
speak of Ignorance. Now this cannot be
explained by the theory of lapse into
ignorance of the most perfect
Consciousness-Force: he even holds that
‘falling away from Self-knowledge and
Self-illumination into the lowest strata
of inconscience can never be a play or
lila which would fill the
heart of reality or sachchidananda with
joy’ (p.248). It can not be that
error or rather falling into error is a
way to truth (p.248 footnote). Nor is
evil inevitable. And triumphantly, says
Prof. Malkani, once we admit or accept
error as colouring our view of the
cosmos or of the things as they are in
themselves, we must simply go all the
way with Advaitism and admit no
explanation of the world except in terms
of maya or the power of
illusion.” (p.249)
The above statements of Prof. Malkani
betray a complete lack of intuition into
fundamentals of spiritual life. We have
already referred to his definitions of
reality or the real, his conception of
maya, his conception of knowing and
conceiving and imagining, and his
complete confidence that nothing really
can be and nothing has been and we are
ever as we were. The advaitic technique
suffers from a vague identification of
reality with permanence, illusion with
knowing and a confusion between
intellect and intuition which is
facilitated by a surreptitious
hypostatizing of intellectual
monism into an intuitive realization or
awareness. The truths of spiritual life
reveal the grades of ascent of the
consciousness, and as Sri Ramanuja
pointed out eight centuries ago the
technique of Advaita is to deny every
evidence and finally hold that all
evidences point to their own destruction
and to the awareness of Reality. A
psychological somersault is the need.
The advaitin cannot explain the
wherefore of this illusion, while the
realists at least realise the actual
fact of untruth and seek to get over it
and find in the blaze of the
illumination that all the untruths have
indeed been real and really revealing
the wonderful beneficence and even
reality of the ascent to Divine nature.
True it is that there are several
stand-points: the stand-point of the
human reveals the maya working out the
passion of the manyness or
multiplicity of souls each seeking an
individual ascent into the
Divine mansion and it may appear
technically as that of the
ignorance since it operates diffusively;
but this is an ignorance which is
implicit or veiled knowledge in the
depths and appears to the
Supreme Transcendent or the Supermind not
as an ignorance but as the puissance of
the Self-illumined operating of the
extremest limit of the multiplicity
which it gathers in the Divine
evolution into the Unity of these in the
higher. The language of dimensions is
essentially symbolic and yet true of the
mystical life, and none who is a mystic
can miss these terms in literature.
Rightly thus Sri Aurobindo has said “For
this ignorance is still in reality a
knowledge seeking for itself behind the
original mask of Inconscience and
missing and finding; its results are the
true consequence of the lapse,–in a way,
even the right working of the recovery
from the lapse” – this sentence is
nothing more than what I have stated,
that the implicit multiplicity in its
creative urge of expansion affirms at
once on one side the multiplicity as
separately working out a harmony or an
affirmation through the many
individualized personalities, affirming
egoism, mind, vital movement, material
distension etc., while all through the
secret unity, in the depths, sustains
and leads and projects these upward and
organizes in its own freedom the
essential ecstacy of the perfections of
the Divine. Sin, error ignorance are the
inevitable representations of the
figures of these movements on the
surface, real and poignant to the
individual souls, but in the final
culmination of their ascent into the
Supermind these can be seen as the real,
essential and necessary steps of its
ascent in these integral processes or
integrating processes. The secret of the
system of Sri Aurobindo lies in this
essential dictum: the Divine Oneness
seeks the self-delight in terms of the
eternal and implicit multiplicity of its
nature in each and in all simultaneously
or successively in space-time nexus.
Mayavada cannot bear this large
formulation of the Nature of Brahman,
being absorbed by the Oneness, staticism,
permanence as statically construed and
not dynamically possible without lapse
into imperfection or unconsciousness.
Sri Aurobindo shews that the two,
Oneness and multiplicity, Change and
Permanence, Transcendence and Immanence,
are all sat-cit-ananda, and the
Anandatva, chaitanyatva, and satyatva
are characteristic of both types of
Self-existence, only they are expressed
in terms of the typal formulation and
both are at every point capable of being
perceived as co-existent. That is to
say, to the seer-vision there is visible
change in Permanence, as permanence is
seen in change; oneness in multiplicity
as well as multiplicity in oneness:
transcendence in nature or immanence as
well as immanence in the transcendence:
the stress being different. In the
creative Process what we perceive are
the dynamic, multiplicity,
change, immanence which express the
permanent, oneness, transcendence, in
terms of process in a space-time. It is
in this sense the Supreme is supremely
wonderful mystery and the sachchidananda
requires and has its dynamic formulation
in the Supermind-consciousness; in this
sense too we can speak of
dual-governance, dampatya, of the
Divine in diunity as Siva and Sakti,
Vishnu-Laksmi; it is this that is the
essentially mystic reality which
derealises nothing that is or was or
will be but uplifts all and integrates
all in the supreme ecstasy of an
integral experience. Thus the final
criticism of Prof. Malkani that Sri
Aurobindo colours his scheme with
error and that therefore he must walk
into the mayavadic parlour is disposed
of as merely a rhetorical pose needing
summary rejection.
Prof.
Malkani does not raise the value
questions to which idealists usually
resort having made no success with
logic; and that saves our trouble a lot.
In a universe wherein everything has no
value, and all, values are cancelled
summarily by closing one’s eyes to the
problems, there happens not sublation
of the values nor yet the
transvaluation of all values but the
values do not exist at all, the only
value being the hypostatized
intellectual Absolute raised to the
status of a mystical Reality by thinking
so hard that it has passed to the level
of intuition (or is it hallucination?).
