Alexander Pope (1688-1744), poet and critic belonging to the Augustan period, wrote his famous Essay on Man during 1733-34. The opening part of the Essay is at times entitled as The Riddle of the World, a phrase from the piece which runs as follows:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
But further down his “Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of fate” continues not with a pleasing note. Either he was sloppily acquainted with India or else had prejudiced views. Byron thought Pope to be “the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and all stages of existence,” but from the seventeenth century Roman Catholic background as he came, perhaps his great morals lived only in it. No wonder we have the following:
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way…
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire.
Not to be aware that an Indian is a worshipper of the Mystic Fire, the Golden Agni with a golden body, hiraņya tanu, is to display lack of insight. And that is what makes Pope’s Essay on Man a flawed “centerpiece”, a system of ethics unconvincing in its contents and in its argument. Neither it justifies, à la Milton, the ways of God to Man,—it is more justifying the ways of Man to God,—nor does it provide a warning that man is imperfect and much is expected of him with the infinite potential in which he can grow, that he is just an isthmus joining Beast and God. Pope was more a Neoclassicist than the inheritor of the spirit of Renaissance which was in the Augustan period on the decline. The vibrant optimism had disappeared, its ardour in man’s intellectual-mystical-creative possibilities. What the Age saw was an imperfect being who always had been so but who had lost hope; the stress was on measured imagination and calculated philosophy, that which was in one way or the other utility-oriented. Not only that; its vocabulary essentially was burdened with words like “sad, pensive, anxious, trembling, at times purple with the Latin sense of very bright, etc.”
The problem is, with this kind of an approach Pope cannot even formulate the Riddle in its true sense, posing the challenge in a forceful questing manner, holding in its contents the basic issue, the intrinsic, the deeper centrality as far as this creation is concerned, in its penetrating essentiality striking at the roots, neither in its individual nor wide cosmic dimensionality. His formulation is at best the formulation of a satirical mind. Nothing much can be gained from its solution if at all it can offer a solution, lacking as it does in substance.
In fact, no solution is expected from it. The best phrase that we can apply to it is his own “Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d”. For Pope man is
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
Man himself is the riddle of the world, but what about the world’s riddle, the great Riddle of the Creation, the presence of error and falsehood and sin and evil? Whence have they come? Is man their product or is it that he has given rise to them all? That is the deeper concern, the presence of the inescapable, the unsolvable conundrum.
It is in this background we must appreciate the care with which Savitri’s mother Malawai has formulated the issue, formulated in a coherent and logical manner, in its completeness. Even while she states the dilemma human mind faces, she is not in a hurry to state it, and she is careful to state it from several points of view. Although it looks as if it is God who is directly responsible for the evil in the world, she is also puzzled if this is true at all. How can a good God give rise to grief and pain? How can come out of something that which is not within it, as if ex nihilo? That is the real occult mystery. It is to that question Malawi demands an answer from Narad. Nothing is left ambiguous in it and it is a well-voiced question, well-framed, though it may appear that she was putting the question “badly”. A precise question can bring out a precise answer and this is exactly what we have in the Book of Fate. If the aim of life is the life divine, it becomes necessary to dispose of the metaphysical difficulty that faces particularly the modern mind and the Book does it fully.
The French poet-writer-dramatist Maurice Magre (1877-1941) asked to the Mother in 1933 more or less the same question—a bad question if it is God who made this evil world. The Mother showed it to Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo decided to answer it himself. This was in June 1933. His answer became the true centerpiece of a booklet entitled The Riddle of This World first published in November 1933. It is now included in his Letters on Yoga. (pp. 24-32) The full answer, patient and many-sided, in luminous calm of the seer-thinker, runs as follows:
It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way the starting-point of the spiritual urge—except for the few to whom the greater experience comes spontaneously without being forced to it by the strong or overwhelming, the afflicting and detaching sense of the Shadow overhanging the whole range of this manifested existence. But still the question remains whether this is indeed, as is contended, the essential character of all manifestation or so long at least as there is a physical world it must be of this nature, so that the desire of birth, the will to manifest or create has to be regarded as the original sin and withdrawal from birth or manifestation as the sole possible way of salvation. For those who perceive it so or with some kindred look—and these have been the majority—there are well-known ways of issue, a straight-cut to spiritual deliverance. But equally it may not be so but only seem so to our ignorance or to a partial knowledge—the imperfection, the evil, the suffering may be a besetting circumstance or a dolorous passage, but not the very condition of manifestation, not the very essence of birth in Nature. And if so, the highest wisdom will lie not in escape, but in the urge towards a victory here, in a consenting association with the Will behind the world, in a discovery of the spiritual gate to perfection which will be at the same time an opening for the entire descent of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude.
All spiritual experience affirms that there is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle and that its characters are infinity, self-existence, freedom, absolute Light, absolute Beatitude. Is there then an unbridgeable gulf between that which is beyond and that which is here or are they two perpetual opposites and only by leaving this adventure in Time behind, by overleaping the gulf can men reach the Eternal? That is what seems to be at the end of one line of experience which has been followed to its rigorous conclusion by Buddhism and a little less rigorously by a certain type of Monistic spirituality which admits some connection of the world with the Divine, but still opposes them in the last resort to each other as truth and illusion. But there is also this other and indubitable experience that the Divine is here in everything as well as above and behind everything, that all is in That and is That when we go back from its appearance to its Reality. It is a significant and illumining fact that the Knower of Brahman even moving and acting in this world, even bearing all its shocks, can live in some absolute peace, light and beatitude of the Divine. There is then here something other than that mere trenchant opposition—there is a mystery, a problem which one would think must admit of some less desperate solution. This spiritual possibility points beyond itself and brings a ray of hope into the darkness of our fallen existence.
And at once a first question arises—is this world an unchanging succession of the same phenomena always or is there in it an evolutionary urge, an evolutionary fact, a ladder of ascension somewhere from an original apparent Inconscience to a more and more developed consciousness, from each development still ascending, emerging on highest heights not yet within our normal reach? If so, what is the sense, the fundamental principle, the logical issue of that progression? Everything seems to point to such a progression as a fact—to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. Here too there is a justifying line of spiritual experience in which we discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic and infinite, a concealed and self-imprisoned Divine, imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held in its secret depths. Out of this apparent Inconscience each potentiality is revealed in its turn, first organised Matter concealing the indwelling Spirit, then Life emerging in the plant and associated in the animal with a growing Mind, then Mind itself evolved and organised in Man. This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in the imperfect mental being called Man? Or is the secret of it simply a succession of rebirths whose only purpose of issue is to labour towards the point at which it can learn its own futility, renounce itself and take its leap into some original unborn Existence or Non-Existence? There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution and not only the soul but Nature herself find her deliverance. This is the Truth which has been seen in flashes, in more and more entirety of its terms by the line of seers whom the Tantra would call the hero-seekers and the divine-seekers and which may now be nearing the point of readiness for its full revelation and experience. Then whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there is this as its high result awaiting us, all that has gone before may not be counted too great a price by the strong and adventurous for the glory that is to come. At any rate the shadow lifts; there is a Divine Light that leans over the world and is not only a far-off incommunicable Lustre.
It is true that the problem still remains why all this that yet is should have been necessary—these crude beginnings, this long and stormy passage—why should the heavy and tedious price be demanded, why should evil and suffering ever have been there. For to the how of the fall into the Ignorance as opposed to the why, the effective cause, there is a substantial agreement in all spiritual experience. It is the division, the separation, the principle of isolation from the Permanent and One that brought it about; it is because the ego set up for itself in the world emphasising its own desire and self-affirmation in preference to its unity with the Divine and its oneness with all; it is because instead of the one supreme Force, Wisdom, Light determining the harmony of all forces each Idea, Force, Form of things was allowed to work itself out as far as it could in the mass of infinite possibilities by its separate will and inevitably in the end by conflict with others. Division, ego, the imperfect consciousness and groping and struggle of a separate self-affirmation are the efficient cause of the suffering and ignorance of this world. Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience; from a dark immense Inconscient this material world arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is struggling into consciousness, attracted towards the hidden Light, ascending but still blindly towards the lost Divinity from which it came.
But why should this have happened at all? One common way of putting the question and answering it ought to be eliminated from the first,—the human way and its ethical revolt and reprobation, its emotional outcry. For it is not, as some religions suppose, a supra-cosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in whose infinite manifestation these things have come—it is the Divine itself that is here, behind us, pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If above It stands for ever in its perfect Light, Bliss and Peace, It is also here; its Light, Bliss and Peace are secretly here supporting all; in ourselves there is a spirit, a central presence greater than the series of surface personalities which, like the supreme Divine itself, is not overborne by the fate they endure. If we find out this Divine within us, if we know ourselves as this spirit which is of one essence and being with the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and in it we can remain ourselves even in the midst of this world’s disharmonies, luminous, blissful and free. That much is the age-old testimony of spiritual experience.
But still what is the purpose and origin of the disharmony—why came this division and ego, this world of painful evolution? Why must evil and sorrow enter into the divine Good, Bliss and Peace? It is hard to answer to the human intelligence on its own level, for the consciousness to which the origin of this phenomenon belongs and to which it stands as it were automatically justified in a supra-intellectual knowledge, is a cosmic and not an individualised human intelligence; it sees in larger spaces, it has another vision and cognition, other terms of consciousness than human reason and feeling. To the human mind one might answer that while in itself the Infinite might be free from those perturbations, yet once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation—with all its consequences—of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one. If it is asked why even if possible it should have been accepted, the answer nearest to the Cosmic Truth which the human intelligence can make is that in the relations or in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable. For once it appears it acquires for the Soul descending into evolutionary manifestation an irresistible attraction which creates the inevitability—an attraction which in human terms on the terrestrial level might be interpreted as the call of the unknown, the joy of danger and difficulty and adventure, the will to attempt the impossible, to work out the incalculable, the will to create the new and the uncreated with one’s own self and life as the material, the fascination of contradictories and their difficult harmonisation—these things translated into another supraphysical, superhuman consciousness, higher and wider than the mental, were the temptation that led to the fall. For to the original being of light on the verge of the descent the one thing unknown was the depths of the abyss, the possibilities of the Divine in the Ignorance and Inconscience. On the other side from the Divine Oneness a vast acquiescence, compassionate, consenting, helpful, a supreme knowledge that this thing must be, that having appeared it must be worked out, that its appearance is in a certain sense part of an incalculable infinite wisdom, that if the plunge into Night was inevitable the emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme Truth be effected—by a working out with its phenomenal opposites as the starting-point of the evolution, as the condition laid down for a transforming emergence. In this acquiescence was embraced too the will of the great Sacrifice, the descent of the Divine itself into the Inconsience to take up the burden of the Ignorance and its consequences, to intervene as the Avatar and the Vibhuti walking between the double sign of the Cross and the Victory towards the fulfilment and deliverance. A too imaged rendering of the inexpressible Truth? But without images how to present to the intellect a mystery far beyond it? It is only when one has crossed the barrier of the limited intelligence and shared in the cosmic experience and the knowledge which sees things from identity that the supreme realities which lie behind these images—images corresponding to the terrestrial fact—assume their divine forms and are felt as simple, natural, implied in the essence of things. It is by entering into that greater consciousness alone that one can grasp the inevitability of its self-creation and its purpose.
This is indeed only the Truth of the manifestation as it presents itself to the consciousness when it stands on the border line between Eternity and the descent into Time where the relation between the One and the Many in the evolution is self-determined, a zone where all that is to be is implied but not yet in action. But the liberated consciousness can rise higher where the problem exists no longer and from there see it in the light of a supreme identity where all is predetermined in the automatic self-existent truth of things and self-justified to an absolute consciousness and wisdom and absolute Delight which is behind all creation and non-creation and the affirmation and negation are both seen with the eyes of the ineffable Reality that delivers and reconciles them. But that knowledge is not expressible to the human mind; its language of light is too undecipherable, the light itself too bright for a consciousness accustomed to the stress and obscurity of the cosmic riddle and entangled in it to follow the clue or to grasp its secret. In any case, it is only when we rise in the spirit beyond the zone of the darkness and the struggle that we enter into the full significance of it and there is a deliverance of the soul from its enigma. To rise to that height of liberation is the true way out and the only means of the indubitable knowledge.
But the liberation and transcendence need not necessarily impose a disappearance, a sheer dissolving out from the manifestation; it can prepare a liberation into action of the highest Knowledge and an intensity of Power that can transform the world and fulfil the evolutionary urge. It is an ascent from which there is no longer a fall but a winged or self-sustained descent of light, force and Ananda.
It is what is inherent in force of being that manifests as becoming; but what the manifestation shall be, its terms, its balance of energies, its arrangement of principles depends on the consciousness which acts in the creative force, on the power of consciousness which Being delivers from itself for manifestation. It is in the nature of Being to be able to grade and vary its powers of consciousness and determine according to the grade and variation its world or its degree and scope of self-revelation. The manifested creation is limited by the power to which it belongs and sees and lives according to it and can only see more, live more powerfully, change its world by opening or moving towards or making descend a greater power of consciousness that was above it. This is what is happening in the evolution of consciousness in our world, a world of inanimate matter producing under the stress of this necessity a power of life, a power of mind which bring into it new forms of creation and still labouring to produce, to make descend into it some supramental power. It is further an operation of creative force which moves between two poles of consciousness. On one side there is a secret consciousness within and above which contains in it all potentialities—there eternally manifest, here awaiting delivery—of light, peace, power and bliss. On the other side there is another, outward on the surface and below, that starts from the apparent opposite of unconsciousness, inertia, blind stress, possibility of suffering and grows by receiving into itself higher and higher powers which make it always re-create its manifestation in larger terms, each new creation of this kind bringing out something of the inner potentiality, making it more and more possible to bring down the Perfection that waits above. As long as the outward personality we call ourselves is centred in the lower powers of consciousness, the riddle of its own existence, its purpose, its necessity is to it an insoluble enigma; if something of the truth is at all conveyed to this outward mental man, he but imperfectly grasps it and perhaps misinterprets and misuses and mislives it. His true staff of walking is made more of a fire of faith than any ascertained and indubitable light of knowledge. It is only by rising toward a higher consciousness beyond the mental line and therefore superconscient now to him that he can emerge from his inability and his ignorance. His full liberation and enlightenment will come when he crosses the line into the light of a new superconscient existence. That is the transcendence which was the object of aspiration of the mystics and the spiritual seekers.
But in itself this would change nothing in the creation here, the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that world no difference. But this crossing of the line if turned not only to an ascending but to a descending purpose would mean the transformation of the line from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of consciousness of the Being now above it. It would mean a new creation on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the conditions here, in as much as that would produce a creation raised into the full flood of spiritual and supramental light in place of one emerging into a half-light of mind out of a darkness of material inconscience. It is only in such a full flood of the realised spirit that the embodied being could know, in the sense of all that was involved in it, the meaning and temporary necessity of his descent into the darkness and its conditions and at the same time dissolve them by a luminous transmutation into a manifestation here of the revealed and no longer of the veiled and disguised or apparently deformed Divine.
The problem of grief and pain is fundamentally a cosmic problem and therefore it can be understood or comprehended only in the cosmic consciousness. It is a problem related to this creation’s process, a problem which has occurred on the way, a problem which need not have occurred. The individual’s central being was there in the Transcendent and it could have remained there for ever, in that heavenly transcendence, in that bliss or Ananda. But then there would not have been the manifestation of increasing delight, of the ever-growing Ananda, in the infinite possibilities of the Non-manifest. It is for this purpose of discovering new possibilities of Ananda that the central being plunged into the Inconscience, plunged to discover its own otherness by which it could bring about a new world full of light and love and beauty and joy and harmony and strength. It is for that that it accepted the unknown’s hazard, accepted “this long and stormy passage”. From the world of Truth it saw the abyss of Ignorance, the great inconvenient truth of the cosmic existence, the mysterious shadow cast by it in the darkness of the Spirit. It felt curious of it, its own otherness and, unmindful of the vulnerability, it plunged into it, rushing headlong in it. It plunged and with it all this began, began in a stiff inexorable way. It is thus that in the long and stormy way pain and grief became an opportunity to turn more and more towards the Divine, with the imperative that it must be sought. That was the happy decision of the Central Being, the Jivatman; so, because there is a purpose behind it, behind the plunge, the fall, it should be respected.
About grief and pain, here is a poignant eulogy from Kim Anastasia,—about her male cat Pookie‘s departure three days ago: “… Pookie also showed me that, during times of great pain or sorrow, there is the joyous opportunity to turn oneself over to the Divine and to allow the Divine resolution to flow through the human and manifest a hint of itself somewhere in matter. Perhaps Pookie gave of himself so the possibility of this might occur… I suppose we will be learning and resonating from the experience of Pookie’s passing for a long time, and healing too. The nature of grief is mystifying, the more so as it exists so powerfully over the passing of a cat. Pookie, Pookie, Pookie. You elegant creature. You have given us everything and in the peacefulness of your passing, reminded us once again that in the end there is only love… I love you, Pookie, always and forever, my big, elegant, adorable, beautiful white cat. May the hug of the Divine be ever upon you, and love always surround you…” The full golden cry rising from the warm and loving hush can be heard at
http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/10/31/3324666.html#1045891
This is grief that got quintessenced, in such a way that grief itself has become mystifying; but what becomes psychicised becomes immortal and then there is no mystery, no grief either. It is true that “pain is the hammer of God to sculpt man” to greatness but it should not be that only because of pain or sorrow or grief one should turn towards him, turn towards the Divine. Happier are those who ever live in the Divine, Narad-like in the name of Vishnu. If pain and grief are going to sculpt us to that greatness, welcome are then pain and grief.
http://www.sciy.org/