World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 69

outside the Becoming, immune, infinite and integral without the Becoming, within the Becoming and within each becoming of the Becoming.
This Being-in-Becoming is what Sri Aurobindo will call "the active Brahman." That which is active in the world, the dynamic energy, shakti, is one Being and one Becoming, multiply becoming, in each of its instances. But each of these instances knows its becoming as its own separate becoming. Therefore we find ourselves in a world of many becomings constituting or contained within one Becoming. This fragmented self-absorbed individual perspective on Becoming is what bestows one of the central sources of suffering in phenomenal experience. Such suffering is experienced due to the perception of "sharing" a world with "others," who each experience the world as if they constituted the center of its movement, yet each such center is distinct, separate, rubbing unpleasantly with all others. Thus each "individual universe of movement" carries an urge to monopolize the "universe of movement" (jagat/world) in which it finds itself, something it attempts through swallowing, annihilation or identification. Since these individual universes of movement are none other than instances of the universal movement, it should be possible for them to experience a primordial identity, but the experience of separation renders such an identity painfully absent in experience.
To consider the universal movement, jagat, we find that the primary properties of this Becoming, its transience, are two-fold : one is, that all things are born, all things change or mutate through time, and all things die - appearance, preservation, mutation, death - "Appearing and perishing on the roads of time," as Sri Aurobindo puts it in his epic poem Savitri. This appearance or semblance of Becoming is part of the condition of a manifestation in which the Eternal has fragmented itself. An evolutionary Becoming begins by the fragmentation of Being, what is called the sacrifice of Purusha in the Vedas. This is primordially a fragmentation in space and time. Fragmentation in space is the discretion and dispersion of the infinite qualities of Brahman. It can be thought of as an infinite particulate dispersion of matter, the independence of the particularity of that which is known to itself by identity in the act of knowledge. Brahman's attempt to know itself reflexively is a self-representation in terms of its qualities, its particularities. Particularity inevitably manifests itself in a particulate world, a world in which there is dispersion into particles. This is the sacrifice of Being in space. Again, this sacrifice is represented in time by the discreteness of temporality, from continuity to discreteness in temporality. We move from that which is seamless and continuous, to that which appears and disappears. It is born, it mutates, it dies. This is thus seen as the inevitable consequence of a manifestation in which multiplicity and temporality form the basis of a self-representation of Brahman.
Transience can have other properties as well. One such property is progress. Things change, but there may be a direction to change, a sense of
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