"The Ego and the Dualities"
Introduction
In this chapter, Sri Aurobindo
describes what it is about our ego consciousness that causes us to perceive
the world wrongly and create suffering in life. He then offers a way out of
ego and pain through an opening to a higher consciousness.
He begins by describing the error of the practical reason which sees only the part, not the whole of truth. It does so because it is subject to the influence of ego, which causes Man to perceive things exclusively, not integrally and totally. This in turn causes us to experience the dualities of existence -- including life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, and good and evil.
However, through right consciousness we can see the right relation of things, the totality of the truth of any matter and thus avoid error, sorrow, pain, evil, and death. We can break the reign of ego and the difficulties it creates in its exclusive consciousness by moving beyond one's self, and opening to the universal and transcended domains.
Sri Aurobindo adds that the emergence of ego had its purpose and Divine sanction as a necessary stage in the evolution of consciousness in Man. It is an intermediate phenomenon necessary for a certain line of development; to allow for multiplicity of possibility, and hence the One to emerge as the Conscious Many.
[DETAILS]
Limits of Knowledge of Truth that Leads to Difficulties in Life
The error of the practical reasons is an excessive subjection to the apparent fact which it can immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying profounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion.
Ego's Exclusivity as Root of our Divided Nature
The nature of ego is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of movement of energies.
Moving to Higher Consciousness to Overcome Ego's Hold On US
-By recovering the right relations, we may eliminate the ego determined reactions (of error, sorrow, pain, evil, and death).
-The individual however can arrive at that which is beyond himself, as a center of the universal and transcendent consciousness.
-The dissolution of the ego takes place by the self-opening of the individual to the universal and transcendent.
-Transcendence transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
Utility of Ego as Necessary Stage in Man's Development
-The limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development.
-Multiplicity permits of the interference of a determinative and a temporary deformative factor, the individual ego.
-We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the Conscious Many.
-The dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil are the first formations of the egoistic consciousness.
Other points:
Limits of Truth and Knowledge
-There is a positive, pre-existent Truth towards which we can progress;
through the dualities of right and wrong knowledge through which we can
progressively move.
-We envisage only external and secondary causes.
-We do not strive towards root knowledge.
Consciousness Beyond Pain and Death
-We can reach states of consciousness where death is seen as only a change in immortal Life; pain a violent back wash of universal delight.