How to talk to a materialist: If you are satisfied with your story, keep it
Also: materialism, the gospel of death
In a conversation with a disciple, the Mother related the following experience.1
The other day, for some question of work, I was led to explain my position from the standpoint of the materialist conviction (I don’t know what their position is today, because that’s something I am not concerned with generally) but anyway I was led to do it because of a certain [occult] work.
For them, all the experiences men have are the result of a mental phenomenon: we have reached a progressive mental development (they are at a loss to explain why or how!), anyhow it was Matter that developed Life, Life that developed Mind, and all of men’s so-called spiritual experiences are mental constructions (they use other words, but I believe that’s their idea). It is, at any rate, a denial of all spiritual existence in itself and of a Being or Force or Something superior which governs everything.
As I said, I don’t know what their position is today, what point they have reached, but I was in the presence of a conviction of that type.
Then I said, “But it’s very simple! I accept your point of view, there is nothing other than what we see, than mankind as it is; all the so-called inner phenomena are due to a mental, cerebral action; and when you die, you die — in other words, the phenomenon of agglomeration comes to the end of its existence, and it dissolves, everything dissolves. That’s all very well.”
(Quite likely, had things been that way, I would have found life so disgusting that I would have left it long ago. But I must add right away that it’s not for any moral or even spiritual reason that I disapprove of suicide, it’s because to me it’s an act of cowardice and something in me doesn’t like cowardice, so I did not ... I would never have fled from the problem.)
That’s one point.
“But then, once you are here on this earth and you have to go to the end, even if the end is nothingness, you go to the end and it’s just as well to do so as best you can, that is to say, to your fullest satisfaction.... I happened to have some philosophical curiosity and to study all kinds of problems, and I came upon Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, and what he taught” (I would say “revealed,” but not to a materialist) “is by far, among the systems men have formulated, the most satisfying FOR ME, the most complete, and what answers the most satisfactorily all the questions that can be asked; it is the one that helps me the most in life to have the feeling that ‘life is worth living.’ Consequently, I try to conform entirely to his teaching and to live it integrally in order to live as best I can — for me. I don’t mind at all if others don’t believe in it — whether they believe in it or not is all the same to me; I don’t need the support of others’ conviction, it’s enough if I am myself satisfied.”
Well, there’s no reply to that.
The experience lasted a long time — for all details, to all problems, that’s what I answered. And when I came to the end, I said to myself, “But that’s a wonderful argument!” Because all the elements of doubt, ignorance, incomprehension, bad will, negation, with that argument they were all muzzled — annulled, they had no effect.
That work, I think, must have had worldwide repercussions. I was in it, in that state (with the sense of a very great power and a wonderful freedom) for certainly at least six or eight hours. (The work had started long before, but it became rather acutely present these last few days.)
It’s much easier to answer out-and-out materialists who are convinced and sincere (“sincere” within the limit of their consciousness, that is) than to answer people who have a religion! Much easier.
Disciple: There’s nothing to be done with religious people.
No. And it’s not good to try either. If they cling to a religion, it means that that religion has helped them somehow or other, has helped something in them which in fact wanted to have a certitude without having to seek for it — to lean on something solid without being responsible for its solidity (someone else is responsible! [Mother laughs]), and to leave their bodies in that way. So to want to pull them out of it shows a lack of compassion — they should just be left where they are. Never do I argue with someone who has a faith — let him keep his faith! And I take great care not to say anything that might shake his faith because it’s not good — such people are unable to have another faith.
But with a materialist ... “I don’t argue, I accept your point of view; only, you have nothing to say — I’ve taken my position, take yours. If you are satisfied with what you know, keep it. If it helps you to live, very good.
“But you have no right to blame or criticize me, because I am taking my position on your own basis. Even if all that I imagine is mere imagination, I prefer that imagination to yours.” That’s all.
⌘
A few weeks later the Mother indicated2 she would like to put as epigraph to the above conversation the following couple of lines from “The Debate of Love and Death,” a canto in Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri.3
O Death, thou speakest Truth but Truth that slays,
I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.
The debate between Savitri and the god of Death actually extends over several cantos, beginning in Canto 2 of Book 9 and ending in Canto 4 of Book 10. After translating the following passage from Book 10, Canto 4, the Mother remarked4: “Basically, according to Sri Aurobindo, materialistic thought is the gospel of death.”
Think not to plant on earth the living Truth
Or make of Matter’s world the home of God;
Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,
God is not there but only the name of God.
After reading the first line, spoken by Death, the Mother interjected: “That’s just what I am doing, Sir.”
⌘
The following words, put into Death’s mouth by Sri Aurobindo, further substantiate that Gentleman’s materialistic outlook:
A fragile miracle of thinking clay, Armed with illusions walks the child of Time. To fill the void around he feels and dreads, The void he came from and to which he goes, He magnifies his self and names it God. He calls the heavens to help his suffering hopes. He sees above him with a longing heart Bare spaces more unconscious than himself That have not even his privilege of mind, And empty of all but their unreal blue, And peoples them with bright and merciful powers. And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts, A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night, A sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire? Death only lasts and the inconscient Void. I only am eternal and endure. I am the shapeless formidable Vast, I am the emptiness that men call Space, I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all, I am the Illimitable, the mute Alone. I, Death, am He; there is no other God. All from my depths are born, they live by death; All to my depths return and are no more. I have made a world by my inconscient Force. My Force is Nature that creates and slays The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live. This angel in thy body thou callst love, Who shapes his wings from thy emotion’s hues, In a ferment of thy body has been born And with the body that housed it it must die. It is a passion of thy yearning cells, It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust; It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind And dreams awhile that it has found its mate; It is thy life that asks a human prop To uphold its weakness lonely in the world Or feeds its hunger on another’s life. What is this love thy thought has deified, This sacred legend and immortal myth? It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh, It is a glorious burning of thy nerves. Thy soul is a brief flower by the gardener Mind Created in thy matter’s terrain plot; It perishes with the plant on which it grows, For from earth’s sap it draws its heavenly hue: Thy thoughts are gleams that pass on Matter’s verge, Thy life a lapsing wave on Matter’s sea.
Not only is Death a materialist, he is also a nihilist and an illusionist:
All upon Matter stands as on a rock. Yet this security and guarantor Pressed for credentials an impostor proves: A cheat of substance where no substance is, An appearance and a symbol and a nought, Its forms have no original right to birth. Its aspect of a fixed stability Is the cover of a captive motion’s swirl, An order of the steps of Energy’s dance Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs, A concrete face of unsubstantial Time, A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space: A stable-seeming movement without change, Yet change arrives and the last change is death. What seemed most real once, is Nihil’s show. Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream? Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter’s force. If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun, If thy life runs a swift and glorious stream, This is the illusion of thy mortal heart Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light. Impotent to live by their own right divine, Convinced of their brilliant unreality, When their supporting ground is cut away, These children of Matter into Matter die. Even Matter vanishes into Energy’s vague And Energy is a motion of old Nought. Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream: If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie, And who was the liar who forged the universe? The Real with the unreal cannot mate. He who would turn to God, must leave the world; He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life; He who has met the Self, renounces self. The voyagers of the million routes of mind Who have travelled through Existence to its end, Sages exploring the world-ocean’s vasts, Have found extinction the sole harbour safe. Two only are the doors of man’s escape, Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace, Death of his soul his last felicity.
To end on a happier note, here are some of Savitri’s replies:
A dangerous music now thou findst, O Death, Melting thy speech into harmonious pain, And flut’st alluringly to tired hopes Thy falsehoods mingled with sad strains of truth. But I forbid thy voice to slay my soul. My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns. Not only is there hope for godheads pure; The violent and darkened deities Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find What the white gods had missed: they too are safe; A mother’s eyes are on them and her arms Stretched out in love desire her rebel sons. One who came love and lover and beloved Eternal, built himself a wondrous field And wove the measures of a marvellous dance. There in its circles and its magic turns Attracted he arrives, repelled he flees. In the wild devious promptings of his mind He tastes the honey of tears and puts off joy Repenting, and has laughter and has wrath, And both are a broken music of the soul Which seeks out reconciled its heavenly rhyme. Ever he comes to us across the years Bearing a new sweet face that is the old. His bliss laughs to us or it calls concealed Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute From moonlit branches in the throbbing woods, Tempting our angry search and passionate pain. Disguised the Lover seeks and draws our souls. He named himself for me, grew Satyavan. If there is a yet happier greater god, Let him first wear the face of Satyavan And let his soul be one with him I love; So let him seek me that I may desire. For only one heart beats within my breast And one god sits there throned. Advance, O Death, Beyond the phantom beauty of this world; [see note below] For of its citizens I am not one. I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.” A traveller new-discovering himself, One made of Matter’s world his starting-point, He made of Nothingness his living-room And Night a process of the eternal light And death a spur towards immortality. God wrapped his head from sight in Matter’s cowl, His consciousness dived into inconscient depths, All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience; Infinity wore a boundless zero’s form. His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps, Eternity a blank spiritual Vast. Annulling an original nullity The Timeless took its ground in emptiness And drew the figure of a universe, That the spirit might adventure into Time And wrestle with adamant Necessity And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage. O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world Assailed by thee and of its road unsure, Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives, And sayest God is not and all is vain. How shall the child already be the man? Because he is infant, shall he never grow? Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn? In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks, In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut; A little element in a little sperm, It grows and is a conqueror and a sage. Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God’s mystic truth, Deny the occult spiritual miracle? Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God? A mute material Nature wakes and sees; She has invented speech, unveiled a will. Something there waits beyond towards which she strives, Something surrounds her into which she grows: To uncover the spirit, to change back into God, To exceed herself is her transcendent task. In God concealed the world began to be, Tardily it travels towards manifest God: Our imperfection towards perfection toils, The body is the chrysalis of a soul: The infinite holds the finite in its arms, Time travels towards revealed eternity. If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude, If brutal masks are there and evil acts, They are incidents of his vast and varied plot, His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps; He makes with these and all his passion-play, A play and yet no play but the deep scheme Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night. To house God’s joy in things Space gave wide room, To house God’s joy in self our souls were born. This universe an old enchantment guards; Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink: The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house; He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs: His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree. Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance, On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth, In spite of death and evil circumstance A will to live persists, a joy to be. There is a joy in all that meets the sense, A joy in all experience of the soul, A joy in evil and a joy in good, A joy in virtue and a joy in sin: Indifferent to the threat of Karmic law, Joy dares to grow upon forbidden soil, Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain: It thrills with the drama of fate and tragic doom, It tears its food from sorrow and ecstasy, On danger and difficulty whets its strength; It wallows with the reptile and the worm And lifts its head, an equal of the stars; It shares the faeries’ dance, dines with the gnome: It basks in the light and heat of many suns, The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power Flatter and foster it with golden beams; It grows towards the Titan and the God. At last the soul turns to eternal things, In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God. Then is there played the crowning Mystery, Then is achieved the longed-for miracle. All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky, And Love that was once an animal’s desire, Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart, An ardent comradeship in the happy mind, Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space. A lonely soul passions for the Alone, The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God, A body is his chamber and his shrine. Then is our being rescued from separateness; All is itself, all is new-felt in God: A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door Gathers the whole world into his single breast. Then shall the business fail of Night and Death: When unity is won, when strife is lost And all is known and all is clasped by Love Who would turn back to ignorance and pain? Easy the heavens were to build for God. Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory Gave of the problem and the race and strife. There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers; There it is greatness to create the gods. Is not the spirit immortal and absolved Always, delivered from the grasp of Time? Why came it down into the mortal’s Space? A charge he gave to his high spirit in man And wrote a hidden decree on Nature’s tops. Freedom is this with ever seated soul, Large in life’s limits, strong in Matter’s knots, Building great stuff of action from the worlds To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands And love and beauty out of war and night, The wager wonderful, the game divine. What liberty has the soul which feels not free Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs, Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace? To seize him better with her boundless heart She accepts the limiting circle of his arms, Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free. This is my answer to thy lures, O Death. Note on "The phantom beauty of this world": Savitri here refers to the twilit world she enters as she pursues Death to his home: Into a happy misty twilit world Where all ran after light and joy and love She slipped; there far-off raptures drew more close And deep anticipations of delight, For ever eager to be grasped and held, Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy. A pearl-winged indistinctness fleeting swam, An air that dared not suffer too much light. Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees, Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze; Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist; Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry, Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued Into harmonious distances unseized.
The Mother’s Agenda, September 7, 1963.
The Mother’s Agenda, October 16, 1963.
Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997); view/download PDF.
The Mother’s Agenda, August 19, 1966.