iPositive Energy

Accept, Love and Live Life Energy.

Human Aspiration and the Two negations - I

All problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony, says Sri Aurobindo. And the quest for harmony in the midst of all the discords of life has been the burden of Man's search.


1. The Materialist Denial: The ordinary material intellect refused to consider validity of anything that exceeded the limits of sense - experience or could not be woven by the mind out of the materials brought in by the senses. It took the physical senses to be the sole means of knowledge, and dealth only with the facts which they provided. ___ ...


2. The Refusal of the Ascetic: In the other extreme pure ___ ... insisted upon as the only Reality. Baffled in his efforts to find connecting like between the bondage of Matter and the freedom of Spirit, between the pain and suffering of distressed humanity and the eternal Ananda of the Divine, and enamored [ ? ] of the Beyond, he accepted the [ super ] - physical as the only reality and looked upon this life as a mere dream devoid of any enduring substance.


Both these divergent channels of thought tried to solve the problem by denying it. ____


The denial of the materialist, although more insistent and immediately successful, is yet less enduring than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the Ascetic. *For* "it carries within itself its own cure", says Sri Aurobindo. The refusal as the part of the materialist to investigate or consider supra-physical phenomena, except as a subordinate activity of material forces could only last for a brief period. The complacence of rationalistic materialism in accepting Matter as the only reality could only be short-lived.


In his attempt to reduce everything to the terms of matter, the materialist found it difficult even to explain the relationship between Mind and Matter, apparently two radically different [ points ? ] was asserted by a certain ___ ... the "Mind is an epiphenomena of Matter at a certain stage of its complexity"; thereafter solution was sought in the assertion that "Mind is no more mental than Matter is material." For the further he proceeded, the more difficult it became for the materialist to explain things in terms of matter. Even, the conception of Matter - Matter which was once taken to be an object of certain knowledge and directly seizable by the senses, became more and more confused and modern science has stumbled upon the fact that it is only certain properties of Matter, and not Matter in itself, that one seizes ... [ using ? ] the senses; may, the ___ ... like the symbol of ___ ... which is not presented to the senses. This led to a kind of agnosticism and it is remarkable what extent some of the advanced schools of scientific investigation confirm in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the formulae of language which were formed in the Vedanta. The researches of science are leading towards a Honism which looks perilously akin to the Vedic idea of one essence with its many becomings [?]. Matter has been found to be itself a formulation of some unknown force.


The materialist would have us believe that life is transitory [ ? ] and haset [ ? ] with all sorts of ___ ... difficulties, and, as such, all ___ ... endeavors should be erected [ ? ] in reaching whatever fleeting pleasures he can from a transient existence, or, lean towards a dispassionate or selfless service of the race and the individual.


"Materialism like spiritual Monism [ ? ] arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not" - that is to say, the world exists at the present moment and this experience is real and compelling, but is is phenomenal and transitory and, as such, it has no enduring reality.


At the other extreme, the ascetic firmly convinced of the unreality of the objective world, treats the individual ego and all the phenomenal world  of ___  believe, that the only rationale behind the meaningless tangle of life / existence [ ? ] ... is by pulling out of this brief taper of human life and a return to the Non-Being or the relationless Absolute.


...to be continued...