Life

Life

1. All Life is individual

2. Life's highest form so far: 'EGO'

   • In Ego individual becomes 'self-contained' 'exclusive center', both spiritually and physically
     • Man is 'Ego'. Self contained but 'not yet complete individual'
       • The more closer, the more complete
       • True person not only absorbs world of matter; by mastering it he absorbs God Himself into his Ego
       • Man before becoming Ego:
         • Clay --> ordained germ of life (from sorry water) --> shaped him -->breathed his spirit --> gave hearing and sight (32:7-9)
       • yet of another make (emergent)
       • Religious experience prior to empirical attitude in life of humanity
       • Levels of Experience 1. Level of matter 2. Level of Life 3. Level of mind & consciousness
         • 3. Consciousness may be imagined as a deflection from life. Its function is to provide a luminous point in order to enlighten the forward rush of life. It is a case of tension, a state of self concentration, by means of which life manages to shut out all memories and associations which have no bearing on a present action. It has no well-defined fringes; it shrinks and expands as the occasion demands.... Thus consciousness is a variety of the purely spiritual principle of life which is not a substance, but an organizing principle, a specific mode of behaviour essentially different to the behaviour of an externally worked machine. Since, however, we cannot conceive of a purely spiritual energy, except in association with a definite combination of sensible elements through which it reveals itself, we are apt to take this combination as the ultimate ground of spiritual energy.

3. Ultimate Ego: God: Most complete person/individual

4. Life is 'forward assimilative movement'

   • Removes all obstructions

5. There is no Universal life

6. its essence is continual creation of desires and ideals

7. For purposes of its preservation and expansion, it has invented or developed out of itself, certain instruments e.g. senses, intellect etc. which help to assimilate obstructions

8. Revelation is Universal property of Life

9. If he does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter. But his life and the onward march of his spirit depend on the establishment of connexions with the reality that confronts him It is knowledge that establishes these connexions, and knowledge is sense-perception elaborated by understanding.

10. concepts of “end” and “purpose”, which act from within

11. And the possession of a career means that the sources of its activity cannot be explained except in reference to a remote past, the origin of which, therefore, must be sought in a spiritual reality revealable in, but non-discoverable by, any analysis of spatial experience. It would, therefore, seem that life is foundational and anterior to the routine of physical and chemical processes which must be regarded as a kind of fixed behaviour formed during a long course of evolution

12. Thought, therefore, in its true nature, is identical with life.

    • But, as I pointed out in my first lecture, thought has a deeper movement also. While it appears to break up Reality into static fragments, its real function is to synthesize the elements of experience by employing categories suitable to the various levels which experience presents. It is as much organic as life. The movement of life, as an organic growth, involves a progressive synthesis of its various stages. Without this synthesis it will cease to be organic growth. It is determined by ends, and the presence of ends means that it is permeated by intelligence. Nor is the activity of intelligence possible without the presence of ends. In conscious experience life and thought permeate each other. They form a unity. Thought, therefore, in its true nature, is identical with life.

13. Life is only a series of acts of attention and an act of attention is inexplicable without reference to a purpose, conscious or unconscious. Even our acts of perception are determined by our immediate interests and purposes

14. Ultimate Reality:  A critical interpretation of the sequence of time as revealed in our selves has led us to a notion of the Ultimate Reality as pure duration in which thought, life, and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity. We cannot conceive this unity except as the unity of a self– an all-embracing concrete self– the ultimate source of all individual life and thought. I venture to think that the error of Bergson consists in regarding pure time as prior to self, to which alone pure duration is predicable. Neither pure space nor pure time can hold together the multiplicity of objects and events. It is the appreciative act of an enduring self only which can seize the multiplicity of duration– broken up into an infinity of instants– and transform it to the organic wholeness of a synthesis.

    • To exist in pure duration is to be a self, and to be a self is to be able to say “I am”. Only that truly exists which can say “I am”. It is the degree of the intuition of “I-amness” that determines the place of a thing in the scale of being.
      • We too say “I am”. But our “I-amness” is dependent and arises out of the distinction between the self and the not-self. The Ultimate Self, in the words of the Qur’an, “can afford to dispense with all the worlds.” To Him the not-self does not present itself as a confronting “other”, or else it would have to be, like our finite self, in spatial relation with the confronting “other”. What we call Nature or the not-self is only a fleeting moment in the life of God.
        • What we call Nature or the not-self is only a fleeting moment in the life of God. His “I-amness” is independent, elemental, absolute. Of such a self it is impossible for us to form an adequate conception. As the Qur’an says, “Naught is like Him”; yet “He hears and sees.” Now a self is unthinkable without a character, i.e. a uniform mode of behaviour. Nature, as we have seen, is not a mass of pure materiality occupying a void. It is a structure of events, a systematic mode of behaviour, and as such organic to the Ultimate Self. Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self. In the picturesque phrase of the Qur’an it is the habit of Allah. From the human point of view it is an interpretation which, in our present situation, we put on the creative activity of the Absolute Ego. At a particular moment in its forward movement it is finite; but since the self to which it is organic is creative, it is liable to increase, and is consequently boundless in the sense that no limi

15. Ultimate Reality is a rationally directed creative life. To interpret this life as an ego is not to fashion God after the image of man. It is only to accept the simple fact of experience that life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of the living organism for a constructive purpose.

16. We cannot conceive this unity except as the unity of a self– an all-embracing concrete self– the ultimate source of all individual life and thought.