Page 44 - NAMAH-Jan-2018

Namah Vol. 26, Issue 4, 15th January 2019

imposition of the whims and fancies of one significant portion of values emerged after
set of people over another. What a colossal the mind had a ‘recoil’ from certain things,
waste of resources! That is how the self- almost instinctively, for example, the ‘recoil’
styled representatives of humanity could be from the phenomenon of ‘death’— a hard
perpetrators of mass-annihilation. fact of life that is so difficult to accept.

The phenomenon of waste is also explicit in The fact that all possibilities have an equal
individual life beset with diseases, disabilities, chance of manifesting gives equal weightage
congenital anomalies, chronic psychoses like to both the ‘waste’ and ‘productive’ elements
schizophrenia and dementia besides the of existence. The wife of Alexander Wood
usual desires, passions, egoistic yearnings, who ‘invented’ the medical hypodermic
dogmatic and stereotyped thinking that syringe (that saves lives) was the first
constitute a large part of ordinary life. recorded subject to die from an injected
overdose of morphine! Thus the productive
One wonders what would be the meaning and the ‘wasteful’ ramifications of the
of all this waste in Existence. Sri Aurobindo hypodermic syringe were implicit at the
explains that, “... surface appearances are not very moment of its invention!
the reality of things, they may be a part of the
truth but they are not the whole reality. One However, instinct and intuition shifts our
must look beyond the external appearances focus to what are considered as the ‘positive’
of things before one can know things in elements of existence. If we can accept
themselves: especially first appearances are anything in life, we should also accept
apt to be deceptive. It is not by regarding a our ‘natural’ instincts and ‘spontaneous’
flash of lightning as a chance ebullition of fiery intuitions. Spiritual experiences consolidate
temper in a cloud that one can know the truth of our intuitive aspiration for a growth in
electricity. We must go far and dig deep before consciousness. Paradoxically, all elements
we can get at the truth about the Force that that are considered to resist the growth
manifested the lightning (3).” of consciousness have a right to recur till
an optimal point for their transcendence
A hypothetical construct on waste is reached.

From the Aurobindonian perspective, the The ‘right to recur’ and the ‘need for
phenomenon of waste could be viewed from transcendence’ are equally important. An
several perspectives: 18-month-old infant goes on repeatedly
asking the same question because his
a. At the onset, the very initiation of sensory perception of different things
manifestation automatically implied that needs to be consolidated. (Otherwise he
all possibilities should have an equal would confuse an apple with a tomato.)
chance of manifesting. After all, what we At a certain point, he has to transcend
label as ‘waste’ or ‘productive’ depends that level for a higher-level consolidation
upon ‘values’ we impose. ‘Values’ emerged of his growing cognitive grasp. If for any
only when mind flowered in creation. A reason his mental growth is hampered,

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