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What
Ignorance Is
Ignorance means A vidya, the separative consciousness
and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and
all that is natural to the separative consciousness
and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is
the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence
separated itself from the light of the supermind (the
divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, -truth of being,
truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and
action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a
world of integral truth and divine harmony created
in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world
founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence
in which all is half-truth, half-error. It is this
that some of the ancient thinkers like Shankara, not
perceiving the greater Truth-Force behind, stigmatised
as Maya and thought to be the highest creative power
of the Divine. All in the consciousness of this creation
is either limited or else perverted by separation
from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives
in only a half-knowledge. Therefore it is called the
Ignorance.
Falsehood, on the other hand,
is not this Avidya, but an extreme result of it. It
is created by an Asuric power which intervenes in
this creation and is not only separated from the Truth
and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error,
but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of
seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power,
the dark Asuric Shakti or Rakshasic Maya, puts forward
its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge
and its wilful distortions or reversals of the truth
as the
verity of things. It is the powers and personalities
of this perverted and perverting consciousness that
we call hostile beings, hostile forces. Whenever these
perversions created by them out of the stuff of the
ignorance are put forward as the truth of things,
that is the Falsehood, in the yogic sense, mithyii,
moha.
SABCL
Vol 22 page 381-82
I have not said that everything is falsehood except
the supramental truth. I said that there was no complete
Truth below the supramental. In the overmind the Truth
of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters
into a separation into parts, many truths fronting
each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make
a world of its own or else to prevail or take its
share in worlds made of a combination of various separated
Truths and Truth- forces. Lower down in the scale,
the fragmentation becomes more and more pronounced,
so as to admit of positive error, falsehood, ignorance,
finally inconscience like that of Matter.
SABCL
Vol 22 page 19-20
But the Ignorance is only a portion of this World-Nature;
it is not the whole of it, not the original power
or creator: it is in its higher origin a self-limiting
Knowledge and even in its lower origin, its emergence
out of the sheer material Inconscience, it is a suppressed
Consciousness labouring to find, to recover itself,
to manifest Knowledge, which is its true character,
as the foundation of existence. In universal Mind
itself there are ranges above our mentality which
are instruments of the cosmic truth- cognition, and
into these the mental being can surely rise...
SABCL
Vol
19 page 845
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