ABSOLUTE FLOW
An intellectual hymn to Mahasaraswati

1
Absolute Flow as Life Practice

The only way to act in Absolute Flow constantly is to become vigilantly attentive to all the instances when, however subtly, you do not—when you are not in it, when you have ignored it or betrayed it or delayed it for the sake of a lower energetic course.

In that instance of lapse, reattend. Hypothesize why or how the jag or discrepancy was caused. What lower desire overrode the greater desire to cleave to the Absolute Flow? In all likelihood, you did something automatically, unconsciously, without reflection or attunement to the surge and ebb of inspiration’s desire. In all likelihood, it was a hiccup that’s caught your breath before. Something led you to excuse a slackness, a degradation in your soul’s demand upon itself. Something external, some stimuli repulsive or attractive, took control of you because you let it, made you once more the pawn of habit, reactiveness, inertia, pessimism, and fear. If, once recognized, the cause of the lapse can be remedied directly, do so. Small adjustments are sometimes enough to jog you back in the very moment, especially if you are practiced in calling a halt to the distraction (or what I call “distrayal”, combining distraction and betrayal). To immediately restore oneself to the course–in full confidence that it is not lost because it cannot be lost–is the best exercise for the most important muscle. Sometimes, however, a redemption of the moment will be out of reach; the moment has passed. Then it will be enough to record the discrepancy and its causes in full contour for relief and reflection, to catch that, “Yes, I was not attentive enough to how I slip; next time, in similar conditions, I will attend better.”

But whether or not the remedy comes quickly, do not fear. Harbor no darkness or depression about your perceived missteps but turn with utmost confidence and gentleness, with firmness and levity, toward something—anything—that you know has prepared, fostered, or recuperated you into Absolute Flow in the past. Self-awareness of course is the primary (and really the only) thing to turn to for that: but this could include any corresponding act of curiosity, generosity, creativity, kindness, communication, quietude, adventure. The principle here is to reenter the “truth-positive” groove—the living fusion of yourself and Life—after having rejected or turned aside from whatever you discern has blocked up the movement and the channel. Take that risk that opens the heart. Stare at the blank of potentiality again and paint with it. Smile at the folly of your little departures as much as you can, as you weigh the gravity of doing so and commit to less wavering. Rigor and ease are not in contradiction. The greatest difficulty is in reality the smoothest path, for its pursuit is the Absolute Flow itself. It is always in reach, its source—the source of all conviction—not being dependent on the contingency of worlds, let alone your little mishaps.

In brief: the cause of a lapse will always be that something threw you out of the Vastness of Consciousness-in-Deed, threw you into a narrower sort of deed with less and a lesser consciousness. If I use a religious terminology now to clarify and amplify the stakes, do not let the words complicate what is, at bottom, a very straightforward dynamic.

2
Absolute Flow as Theoflammation

Absolute Flow is Siva-Shakti: the crystalline consciousness and its matrixial effectivity (Wirklichkeit), like fire and its heat. It is the indestructible in the real, the undying impulse of Life, the God who needs nothing to be God and yet “becomes God” in what is not-yet-God, the light of freedom and knowledge which is also a will, a power, and its physical imprint, trace and testimony. The sacred teaching or ambition of all humanity is this: “Thou art That” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7), “You are gods” (Psalm 10:83, John 10:34). The spark of the infinite is in you, and it will set aflame all the finitude that surrounds you, whatever you touch, if you let it consume you. Ita, inflammata omnia, “Go, set fire to everything” (St. Ignatius). Flamme bin ich sicherlich, “Surely I am flame” (Nietzsche). Everyone with the courage to flare is made to say with Jesus, “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing!” That is the voice of the “infinite I-am” in contact with the matrixial potentiality of earth, with the human spirit ripe for transfiguration. The just are flames and fuel (Nietzsche).

3
Is Absolute Flow Religious?

But isn’t the era over when this activity, this dedication, this spiritual inflammation, is restricted to explicitly religious life practices and idioms, as the religious traditions have defined them?

Religions are collective stabilization procedures for insights and energies that are always wily, dangerous, excessive, and strange—incomprehensibly free, blindingly bright, and bottomlessly transformative of the real. In this light, the purpose of religion was and is to protect these insight-energies from contamination with falsehood and to engrain them in the human psyche and lifeworld to the point of becoming irreversible evolutionary grooves.

Religions compel belief because belief is always a matter of stretching oneself (cognitively, psychically, emotionally, physiologically) to a unknown potential that is wider, longer, deeper, and higher than what is or can be known. Hence, at its limit, religion as a self-consistent unit deconstructs itself: it voids its own extant forms so that its secret cargo can explode in greater fullness onto the scene. “Faith” is always faith in a more glorious and sovereign way of being or future: the beatific prospects we seem to glimpse only rarely now will become the essence and totality of our life. Faith looks ahead to the period of our convalescence, then to our permanent astonishment and bliss; and it finds the pledge of this in those who embodied the widest and wildest insight-energies and stabilized them, gave them form and articulation, and so preserved them for collective rehumanization. The ritual, regimen, and writ of the old religions, above all humanity’s reverence for its stellar specimens, sages, poet-saints, and philosophers, all stem from a need for rock solid orientation, strictness and training. Without them these obscure hopes and powers would never gain the respect and recognition needed for them to take effect—in a nature that does not necessarily begin with an attitude of welcome toward these immense forces; or, conversely, welcomes them so boundlessly totally that they equal out to destructiveness, squandering, and loss. An indelible influence of spirit on the flesh, better, of love and life on mind and knowledge, had to be made—and this always required the severity of a discipline.

—So do not mistake the liberation from the old! The need for discipline is even stronger after the paragons and pioneers of insight-energy, Siva-Shakti, have broken from prior religious molds and set out new horizons for the maximum Theoflammation. For with any freedom gained from a prior form, the danger of an unhelpful or detrimental unruliness is all the greater: the risk of arbitrariness, of centrifugal wastes of passion, of poor choice in new objects of desire, in the arrogance of independent charters, etc. This risk is especially great if the new form co-opts the Flow-state for merely individual goals and ends; that is a surefire way to stifle the course and bloom in the long-run, for whatever does not accord with Creation, Iccha-shakti, has no real creative being or becoming in itself.

Hence the continued validity of the old, universal religious imperative, no matter how much we trample on it with new interpretations and metaphors: “Not mine, but Thine, O Lord!”

For Absolute Flow is not just freedom, it is also grace—the superfluous gratuity of unbound onto-semiological inflation in every domain of transience and of the abiding realities, soul and symbol, earth and sky. For if one’s deeds do not routinely produce gratitude—I mean continual, permanent, quasi-unexpected gratitude, such that more and more of one’s instants are permeated with lightness, vision, hope and amazement—then although one may feel ‘freer’, one is certainly not more graceful: not more enduring, not more in the Flow.

Grace, of course, is painful. We creatures suffer all our limitations in the journey into union with the unlimited. We are continually confronted with the grossness of our lapse. We resist stretching our vessel to contain more light and force. We buck even when asked to change for the better! From the physical and chemical level up to our daily routines and thought patterns, there is a tendency to repeat without disturbance, to rely on what has worked in the past, to settle in. An insuperable conservatism seems baked into temporal things, a policy of steady, nearly imperceptible reform. Revolutionary outbreaks are rare, and fragile, and hardly preferred most times. This is a blessing and a curse. As much as regularity can prevent backsliding, it can also delay innovation and higher ascensions, can cloud and immure. At the same time, there is a rationale to our reliance on prior, familiar forms. They protect us in unreadiness, so that our readiness does not degrade any further when we slip. Subsurface resources gather, grooves of the future are hesitantly but surely cut. Stored energies incrementally work up the gumption to act. A series of false-steps and relapses suddenly cracks through a resistance into a resolution henceforward beyond defeat. Evolution demands both audacious gestures and stabilizations, chaoticizations and sound orderings—for grace is surely at work in both. Disciplined rule is to sovereignty as basecamp is to summit, and without a solid foundation on the “peace that surpasseth understanding,” nothing can be achieved.[1]

And yet, and yet! How often does regularity become an excuse to not advance! How often does comfort mean stagnation, cozy contentment a slow, insidious decay! So let us not ever forget: spirit is earth and flame. It abhors whatever tranquilizer would prevent its demand from being heard. It casts into hellfire whatever does not continue to bear fruit. True delight is supremely choosy! This capacity is its openness, its confidence to bless…

But because it is insatiable for divinization, grace often comes across as cruel. It propels us, whether we like it or not, toward death-and-resurrection, the transformation of our current state into the Unknown. Grace cannot accomplish its work without this, our consent. Wills and capacities must be tested. Possibilities must take their turn in the try-out. Freedom must be won by insight and purity of heart, decided upon by an ennobled will. A faculty of valuation, of selection, must emerge on top—a psychic intuition of the topmost value which knows what to do and does not look back.

That is why, for human- and Siva-consciousness to be one in-Deed, the unity must be one of unsubjugated, unsubservient, undual surrender; one of joyous love and consecration to the Divine, both embodied and beyond; one of friendship with Life as of with a joy that is eternal; one of an identity that has overcome any need of thought or exertion: Such is the conferrance of self to Self which knows—because all else has proved too little!—that there is nothing better in all the world than to “do the will of heaven on earth”—to know heaven as a state of the heart, everywhere and nowhere and never deferred.

4
Absolute Flow is Supermental

The difficulty for the mind here is manifold. It wants to understand in its own concepts and language, first, before it acts; and so it never does. Because it is fearful and lacks faith in the future, it is anxious to control the externals from without, rather than exerting a confident psychic influence on the world from the inside emanation. Likewise, the virtues corresponding to the next step of evolution cannot necessarily be recognized and categorized by means of the previous stages. Too much is overlapping and quixotic, too much is resistant to copycatting, too much is unique, secret, inimitable. The novel bliss of a divinized human is not a break per se, but an outgrowth that no one could have predicted. It conceals its roots so that it will live up to the stakes of the evolutionary challenge: that each individuate into the universal, rather than take it on as readymade in emulation.

The mind easily feels a vertigo at that edge and runs back from the precipice to the familiar and safe. At the same time, running to the edge too quickly can be a recipe for disaster. The mind must negotiate between the calculable and incalculable, the steady Old Road and the spellbinding New, building on past stabilities without getting too comfortable. It must reach upwards without cutting off its own legs.

But if it tries to deal with any of this purely on its own terms, the mind is doomed to falseness, desperation, a feeling that all is a dead-end. “The mind is a web of defeatism,” said the Mother, for in centering its interpretation of reality on its own constructs and categories, it forecloses the more intuitive, illuminative, and supermental openings above. The mind freezes what is in motion with its abstractions, lacking the warmth of the spirit’s intensity to seize whatever happens and set it alive. It easily becomes skeptical of Absolute Flow; it thwarts its path by doubting it, denying it, underestimating it, diverting it. The mind looks for results too quickly, too—let this haste be tempered once and for all by Sri Aurobindo’s word: “Infinite consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results.” Only a mind for infinity can fathom and trust its work, like the child of a timeless universe trusts time.

5
Absolute Flow as Sachchidananda-in-Person

The only way to ensure the advent of this—the supermental manifestation, the dawn of the Ubermensch—is to accept that every level of existence is open to divinization; and to begin ever and again with the smallest dimensions and considerations to that end.

Every level demands our attention, and whenever one level is strengthened the rest become open to new potentiations. There is no need to bother over the grand result, nor even to struggle per se. If one cleaves to Absolute Flow, intervening point-by-point wherever needed, the total consequence is already taken care of. It is assured.

The logic here is that God, as the principle of quickening, can act most powerfully, most widely, most consequently, and most lovingly in a consciousness and body that knows and loves the infinite most intimately at every level of existence. In that way, its rule of life is immanent to that life, catered precisely to its conditions, its vessel, its destiny, making it a form-of-Life without equal, exhibited to all for the bestment of all.

The well-developed human is thus the Embodiment of the Incomprehensible, its gravity and its lightness. It reveals itself transparently, in glory, as a riddle for the liberation of others—indeed as a supreme happiness for others. To be a supreme happiness for others! Hypostatic union will then become commonplace—on the condition that each understand its law: that every idealizing lie be sacrificed, that honesty about lapses from Absolute Flow be an adamantine ethic and logic…

As the automatic, unconscious, all-too-human forms loosen their grip and sway over our practice-vessels—though without any needless destabilizations, eschewing the vanity of “surpassings”—intimacy with the Divine deepens, and its effectivity blossoms into the world. That ever-deepening intimacy is synonymous with Absolute Flow reaching and penetrating more and more details and dimensions of a life, until finally it imbues them all. Down to the finest grain of material relations, the All-Fecundating spreads Self in its influence, and the unconscious is perfected to bear the whole organism to that self-forgetfulness which is identical to self-perfection.

Such is why devotion to the Divine requires—and it is just that simple—that we seek and sustain a sense for the enormity of what we are called to do, our vocation, alongside a quiet cheerfulness about the practical simplicity of its approach. That is the future contained in nuce in us, our every step. It ripens in every act we dedicate to the attention that refines it, that judges the subtle movements and reactions in the soul, that looks from above and decides from within all the major and minor adjustments we must make to best abide in Absolute Flow: that Siva may abide in our within and Shakti be the whole of our without: that we realize, independently of the mind’s theories and beliefs, the All-Suffusing as the suffusion of our highest humanity into all we touch and think and do.

There we will find the irresistible attraction of an awe that compels peace in passion and passion for the infinite in every feat: a restfulness so intense and overflowing it is easily mistaken for a restless insatiability, when really it is just that Sachchidananda-in-Person, the very supremacy and the very seed.

Notes:

[1] The phrase should not be understood in an exclusively Christian way. Sri Aurobindo’s principle is helpful: “The peace is the condition of the right play of the Force. Force and Peace are two different powers of the Divine. Peace is the first condition, but peace of itself does not bring Force—it is a receptacle of Force, not a bringer of Force” (Letters on Yoga II, p. 155). For a helpful disambiguation, see Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as the Enemy of Nature”, section 3.

—June 28/Aug 10, 2024
—See also on this site: The Spanda Principle and Anti-Mysticism