2 § Spirit and Intellect

IT is frequently affirmed that Spirit is not other than _Ātmā_, but nevertheless there are instances when this same Spirit seems to be identified only with _Buddhi_. Is there not something contradictory here? It would be insufficient to see in this a simple question of terminology, for if such were the case one might as well go further and accept indiscriminately the many more or less vague and incorrect meanings commonly given to the word 'spirit', instead of carefully avoiding them, as we have always endeavoured to do; and the only too evident inadequacy of western languages for expressing metaphysical ideas is no reason, to say the least, for not taking all the precautions necessary to avoid confusions. What justifies these two uses of the same word—let us state it at the outset—is the correspondence which exists between different levels of reality and which makes possible the transposition of certain terms from one of these levels to another.

The case in question is comparable to that of the word 'essence', which can also be used in several different ways. Insofar as it is the correlative of 'substance', and from the point of view of universal manifestation, it designates _Purusha_ in relation to _Prakriti_. But it can be transposed beyond this duality, and such is necessarily the case when one speaks of the 'Divine Essence', even if, as usually happens in the West, those who use this expression do not go beyond pure Being in their conception of the Divinity. Similarly, one can speak of the essence of a being as complementary to its substance, but one can also designate as essence that which constitutes the ultimate, immutable and unconditioned reality of that being; and the reason is that the first is in the final analysis nothing other than the expression of the second in regard to manifestation. Now if it be said that the spirit of a being is the^[1] same as its essence, this can also be understood in both the one and the other of the two senses; and from the point of view of absolute reality, spirit or essence obviously is not and cannot be anything other than _Ātmā_. It must however be noted that _ātmā_, comprising within itself principially all reality, cannot for that very reason enter into correlation with anything whatsoever. Thus, as long as it is a question of the constitutive principles of a being in its conditioned states, what is called spirit, as for example in the ternary 'spirit, soul and body', can no longer be the unconditioned _ātmā_, but only that which most directly represents it in manifestation. We could add that this is not even the essence in correlation with substance, for if it be true that substance implies manifestation it is nevertheless not itself within manifestation. Strictly speaking, therefore, the spirit in this sense can only be the first and loftiest of all manifested principles, that is, _Buddhi_.

It is thus necessary, from the point of view of a state of manifestation such as the individual human state, to introduce what might be called a question of 'perspective'; when we speak of the universal, distinguishing it from the individual, we must here understand not only the unmanifested, but also that which in manifestation itself is supra-individual, that is, supraformal manifestation to which _Buddhi_ essentially belongs. Similarly, with regard to the individuality as such, including as it does the entirety of the psychic and corporeal elements, we can only designate as spiritual the principles that transcend the individuality, which again is precisely the case with _Buddhi_ or the intellect. This is why we can say, as we often have, that for us pure intellectuality and spirituality are ultimately synonymous. Moreover, the Intellect itself can also be transposed, in the same way as the spirit, for it is generally considered altogether admissible to speak of the 'Divine Intellect'. In this connection, we will note again that even though the _gunas_ are inherent in _Prakriti_, _sattwa_ can only be considered as a spiritual (or 'spiritualising') tendency because it is the tendency that orients the being towards the higher states. We have here a consequence of the same 'perspective' which counts the supra-individual states as intermediary degrees between the human state and the unconditioned state, though between the unconditioned and any conditioned state whatsoever, even the most elevated of all, there is really no common measure.^[2]

What must be emphasized is the essentially supra-individual nature of the pure Intellect. Moreover, it is only what belongs to this superhuman order that can be called truly transcendent, since this term cannot normally be applied except to what lies beyond the individual domain. The Intellect, therefore, is never individualised; furthermore, this corresponds to what is expressed, considering now more particularly the corporeal world, when it is said that whatever the appearances may be, the Spirit is never 'incarnated', which is equally true in all senses wherein the word 'spirit' can be legitimately used. ^[3] It follows that the distinction which exists between the Spirit and elements of the individual order are much more profound than all those which can be established among these individual elements themselves, as for example between the psychic and corporeal elements, that is, between those which belong respectively to subtle and gross manifestation, both of which are no more than modalities of formal manifestation.^[4]

But this is still not all. Not only does _Buddhi_, insofar as it is the first of the productions of _Prakriti_, constitute the link between all the states of manifestation, but from another angle and looking at things from a principial viewpoint, _Buddhi_ appears as the luminous ray emanating from the Spiritual Sun, which is _Ātmā_ itself. One can say, therefore, that _Buddhi_ is also the first manifestation of _Ātmā_ even though it must be clearly understood that _Ātmā_ itself remains unmanifest, not being affected or modified by any contingency.^[6] Now light is essentially one and is not of a different nature in the Sun and in the Sun's rays, which are not distinct from it except in an illusory mode as far as the Sun itself is concerned (although this distinction is none the less real for the eye which perceives the rays and which here represents the being situated within manifestation).^[7] By reason of this essential 'connaturality', _Buddhi_, in the final analysis, is not other than the expression of _Ātmā_ in the manifested order. This luminous ray which links all the states together is also represented symbolically as the 'breath' by which they subsist—which, as one will note, is in strict conformity with the etymological sense of the words designating Spirit (whether this be the Latin _spiritus_ or the Greek _pneuma_); and as we have already explained on other occasions, it is strictly speaking the _sūtrātmā_, which amounts to saying that it is really _Ātmā_ itself or, more precisely, it is the appearance which _Ātmā_ takes from the moment that, instead of considering only the Supreme Principle (which would then be represented as the Sun containing in itself all the rays in an indistinguished state), we consider the manifested states also. This appearance, moreover, is such only from the point of view of the beings within the manifested states; and it is this appearance which seems to give to the ray an existence distinct