Purusa and Prakriti Are Inseparable

17 August 2001, 12:42am IST
S S HANS.

The world comprises two principles, life and matter. purusa or god represents life and prakriti or nature represents matter. according to sri aurobindo, the poet-seer, ``life is a movement of the eternal in time''.

Purusa is the seer and the prakriti, the object of sight.

The bhagavad gita declares prakriti to be responsible for bringing into existence creation and its instruments. the five elements earth, water, fire, air and ether and their five attributes touch, taste, sight, smell and sound constitute creation while the five organs of perception or gyan indiryas, the five organs of action called karm indiryas plus the mind, the faculty of discrimination and ego ^ these 13 constitute the instruments.

Prakriti is not a part of purusa. she is his shakti or energy and is not different from shaktiman or energiser. at the time of the final dissolution of creation, the whole of this objective world gets dissolved into prakriti. this prakriti alone remains and the objective world disappears. in other words, she manifests herself in the form of this objective world and when she is inactive, she remains in her unmanifest state. from prakriti evolves in turn the principles of cosmic intelligence, cosmic ego and cosmic mind, being in fact the three different phases of the same principle, the mind. according to sri aurobindo, ``nature laboured for innumerable million of years to create a material universe of flaming suns and systems. she stooped to make this earth a habitable planet. for all that incalculable time, she was or seemed busy only with the evolution of matter.''

Speech, mind and intellect cannot describe or understand prakriti because all these are her evolute and that is why she is called indefinable and incomprehensible. since the cause always pervades its effects, prakriti pervades all the objective world and its elements. but the purusa, being very subtle, his pervasiveness is even greater than that of prakriti. so the great cause of all purusa which signifies god or the principle of consciousness pervades both the prakriti and its evolute, the objective world and its elements. prakriti carries on the process of creation with purusa as her lord and master under his supervision. the virtual creator is thus the purusa himself. prakriti is only his agent.

There are two varieties of purusa ^ the jivatma which is the individual soul and paramatma or god.

The paramatma has again two aspects ^ saguna with attributes like sattava that represents goodness, rajas which stands for action while tamas represents inertia and nirguna without attributes that stands for the absolute. in other words, god is pure consciousness but he is a person and impersonal. in jnana or knowledge we see god as impersonal and in bhakti or devotion we see god as personal.

Sri ramakrishna says, ``shakti stands for the personal aspect of the impersonal.'' both personal and impersonal are the two aspects of the same reality, the integral brahma or the supreme purusa. it is fundamentally the static and dynamic aspects of the same reality which are complementary and remain inseparably together. the static aspect represents the timeless, spaceless and causeless substratum as the brahman or the unmanifest absolute whereas the dynamic one is represented by the infinite caution, creation or flow of energy.

The wonderful phenomenon about reality is that apparently contradictory but factually complementary aspects are so absolutely inseparable that the one is inconceivable without the other. thus the reality is defined as something mysterious wherein the seeming contradictions are harmoniously blended and wherein the being and becoming, consciousness and matter, subject and object, brahman and maya, unmanifest and manifest, absolute and relative, impersonal and personal, purusa and prakriti, all different expressions of the same reality, are held together in one embrace.

It may be summed up in a classic statement by sri aurobindo, ``all life here is a stage in an unfolding progressive evolution of a spirit that has involved itself in matter and is labouring to manifest itself in that reluctant substance. this is the whole secret of earthly existence.''