The following passage from The Life Divine pretty aptly sums up the distinction between the relative and the divine consciousness:
We, human beings, are phenomenally a particular form of consciousness, subject to Time and Space, and can only be, in our surface consciousness which is all we know of ourselves, one thing at a time, one formation, one poise of being, one aggregate of experience; and that one thing is for us the truth of ourselves which we acknowledge; all the rest is either not true or no longer true, because it has disappeared into the past out of our ken, or not yet true, because it is waiting in the future and not yet in our ken. But the Divine Consciousness is not so particularised, nor so limited; it can be many things at a time and take more than one enduring poise even for all time. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, ch.16, “The Treiple Status of Supermind” p.145
How then can the relative mind and the surface consciousness, which sees and can be only one thing at a time, arrive at an understanding of the Absolute, which is all things at all times? Thus the three schools of Vedanta - Nondualism, Qualified Dualism, and Dualism, can be seen as equally true, but also equally partial and limited, because each is based on a mental interpretation of only one particular spiritual experience:
It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole eternal truth and states it in the terms of our alldividing mental logic that the necessity for mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises. Thus, emphasising the sole truth of the unitarian consciousness, we observe the play of the divine unity, erroneously rendered by our mentality into the terms of real difference, but, not satisfied with correcting this error of the mind by the truth of a higher principle, we assert that the play itself is an illusion. Or, emphasising the play of the One in the Many, we declare a qualified unity and regard the individual soul as a soul-form of the Supreme, but would assert the eternity of this qualified existence and deny altogether the experience of a pure consciousness in an unqualified oneness. Or, again, emphasising the play of difference, we assert that the Supreme and the human soul are eternally different and reject the validity of an experience which exceeds and seems to abolish that difference. But the position that we have now firmly taken absolves us from the necessity of these negations and exclusions: we see that there is a truth behind all these affirmations, but at the same time an excess which leads to an ill-founded negation. Affirming, as we have done, the absolute absoluteness of That, not limited by our ideas of unity, not limited by our ideas of multiplicity, affirming the unity as a basis for the manifestation of the multiplicity and the multiplicity as the basis for the return to oneness and the enjoyment of unity in the divine manifestation, we need not burden our present statement with these discussions or undertake the vain labour of enslaving to our mental distinctions and definitions the absolute freedom of the Divine Infinite. (ibid p.149)
Similarily, I would assert that Buddhist shunyavada (if this is indeed distinct from Shankaran Advaita) is another partial perspective, and so on again with any philosophy and any spiritual experience that human consciousness can conceive or attain. Nor should we just follow Sri Aurobindo in a literalist sense, saying atht every word and punctuation mark is true for all time. To me, that is bad as following a religion. Rather, the above words - or any other that is inspirational - can be used as the impetus for gnosis, which means going beyond the limited mental perspective to direct appreciation of the Supreme. Posted in Integral Metatheory No Comments »
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