There is, behind this immense façade of a universe, a Nothing! — or at best a mechanical energy of matter that is blindly spinning into an equally blind void, claims the material scientist. All creation is the meaningless expansion of this energy, exhausting itself in a wasteful expenditure. This is one world-view, unproven and unprovable by mind and reason.
There is another, the ancient Vedic vision of a Perfect Wisdom, that has gone forth into worlds beyond worlds creating universes out of Itself, using chance and ‘accidents’ as steps of a long interminable chain that adapts means to an end that is foreseen by an original foresight, extending Itself as Space and working Itself out through the long motions and gyrations of Time. This is another world vision, unprovable by mind but not unknowable to faculties that transcend reason and need only to be awakened by steady application of our natural powers.
Mankind has always swung between these two world-views, the balance tilting now this side, and now another. Leaning upon the sense perception and reason as the sole arbiter of truth, it has held onto the ‘negative’ theory, a zero, a nothing that gives birth to and drives the motion of everything. Leaning on an inward eye of faith and intuition, it has held onto the conviction of an eternal ‘positive’ integer that is the secret home of truth and the birthplace of all things.
But now we proceed into another age where man would be able to find a definitive answer to this never-ending quest of the Real behind appearances and of the original force that stands not merely above and behind, but also within creation as a conscious wisdom that has taken as much care to determine the drift of the galaxies as in the formation of a grain of sand. This answer will not come about either by armchair arguments or conjectures, whether scientific or philosophical, but by man’s inner expansion, by his sudden and swift or slow and painstaking growth out of the mesh of the senses in which he is caught. It is when man transcends reason, as perfectly as he today transcends the animal-self of habits and instincts that he will be able to stand face to face with Truth. Then he shall know not only the mind of God but also the heart of the unknowable, the will of the cosmic creator, for, in the last analysis, all our knowledge and our theories and opinions are nothing else but a reflection of our limitation to know and experience and be. The perfect answer lies not outside, but within us, in the knowledge of who we essentially are. As is our self-regard, so does the Reality reveal itself to us.
“But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
The power of a spiritual gaze.” *
* Sri Aurobindo. Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1970, p. 49.
