Sri Aurobindo: This becomes still clearer if we consider the manifestation of Sachchidananda. In that manifestation Delight translates itself into Love; Consciousness translates itself into double terms, conceptive Knowledge, executive Force; Existence translates itself into Being, that is to say, into Person and Substance. But Love is incomplete without a Lover and an object of Love, Knowledge without a Knower and an object of Knowledge, Force without a Worker and a Work, Substance without a Person cognizing and constituting it.  This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of delight, in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence of Brahman an Existent; but the object of Brahman’s delight and consciousness and the term and stuff of Its existence are Itself.


Sri Aurobindo: In the divine Being Knowledge, the Knower and the Known and, therefore, necessarily also Delight, the Enjoyer and the Enjoyed  are one.  This Self-Awareness and Self-Delight of Brahman has two modes of its Force of consciousness, its Prakriti or Maya, — intensive in self-absorption, diffusive in self-extension. The intensive mode is proper to the pure and silent Brahman; the diffusive to the active Brahman. It is the diffusion of the Selfexistent in the term and stuff of His own existence that we call the world, the becoming or the perpetual movement (, ).


Sri Aurobindo: It is Brahman that becomes; what He becomes is also the Brahman. The object of Love is the self of the Lover; the work is the self-ﬁguration of the Worker; Universe is body and action of the Lord.  When, therefore, we consider the abstract and impersonal aspect of the inﬁnite existence, we say, “That”; when we consider the Existent self-aware and self-blissful, we say, “He”. Neither conception is entirely complete. Brahman itself is the Unknowable beyond all conceptions of Personality and Impersonality.


Sri Aurobindo: We may call it “That” to show that we exile from our afﬁrmation all term and deﬁnition. We may equally call it “He”, provided we speak with the same intention of rigorous exclusion. “Tat” and “Sa” are always the same, One that escapes deﬁnition.  In the universe there is a constant relation of Oneness and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is the possibility of an inﬁnite variety of relations.


Sri Aurobindo: These relations are determined by the play of the divine existence, the Lord, entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at ﬁrst as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up by them and used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is the object and function of Religion. All religions are justiﬁed by this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goal.  The Divine Personality reveals Himself in various forms and names to the individual soul.


Sri Aurobindo: These forms and names are in a sense created in the human consciousness; in another they are eternal symbols revealed by the Divine who thus concretises Himself in mind-form to the multiple consciousness and aids it in its return to its own Unity.  HE THAT WENT ABROAD   It is He that has extended Himself in the relative consciousness whose totality of ﬁnite and changeable circumstances dependent on an equal, immutable and eternal Inﬁnity is what we call the Universe.  In this extension we have, therefore, two aspects, one of pure inﬁnite relationless immutability, another of a totality of objects in Time and Space working out their relations through causality.


Sri Aurobindo: Both are different and mutually complementary expressions of the same unknowable “He”.  To express the inﬁnite Immutability the Upanishad uses a series of neuter adjectives, “Bright, bodiless, without scar, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil.” To express the same Absolute as cause, continent and governing Inhabitant of the totality of objects and of each object in the totality ( ) it uses four masculine epithets, “The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent” or “the Self-Becoming”.  The Immutable is the still and secret foundation of the play and the movement, extended equally, impartially in all things, , lending its support to all without choice or active participation. Secure and free in His eternal immutability the Lord projects Himself into the play and the movement, becoming there in His self-existence all that the Seer in Him visualises and the Thinker in Him conceives.


Sri Aurobindo: THE PURE IMMUTABLE  The pure immutability of the Lord is “bright”. It is a luminosity of pure concentrated Self-awareness, not broken by refractions, not breaking out into colour and form. It is the pure selfknowledge of the Purusha, the conscious Soul, with his Power, his executive Force contained and inactive.


Sri Aurobindo: It is “bodiless”, — without form, indivisible and without appearance of division. It is one equal Purusha in all things, not divided by the divisions of Space and Time, — a pure selfconscious Absolute.  It is without scar, that is, without defect, break or imperfection. It is untouched and unaffected by the mutabilities. It supports their clash of relations, their play of more and less, of increase and diminution, of irruption and interpenetration.


Sri Aurobindo: For Itself is without action,, “motionless, sempiternal”.  It is without sinews. The reason for Its being without scar is that It does not put out Power, does not dispense Force in multiple channels, does not lose it here, increase it there, replenish its loss or seek by love or by violence its complementary or its food. It is without nerves of force; It does not pour itself out in the energies of the Pranic dynamism, of Life, of Matarishwan.  It is pure, unpierced by evil.


Sri Aurobindo: What we call sin or evil, is merely excess and defect, wrong placement, inharmonious action and reaction. By its equality, by its inaction even while it supports all action, the conscious Soul retains its eternal freedom and eternal purity. For it is unmodiﬁed; It watches as the Sakshi, the witness, the modiﬁcations effected by Prakriti, but does not partake of them, does not get clogged with them, receives not their impression.  THE SOUL INALIENABLY FREE  What is the relation of the active Brahman and of the human soul to this pure Inactive?


Sri Aurobindo: They too are That. Action does not change the nature of the Self, but only the nature of the diverse forms. The Self is always pure, blissful, perfect, whether inactive or participating in action.  The Self is all things and exceeds them. It exceeds always that in which the mind is engrossed, that which it takes in a particular time and space as a ﬁgure of itself.


Sri Aurobindo: The boundless whole is always perfect. The totality of things is a complete harmony without wound or ﬂaw. The view-point of the part taken for a whole, in other words the Ignorance, is the broken reﬂection which creates the consciousness of limitation, incompleteness and discord. We shall see that this Ignorance has a use in the play of the Brahman; but in itself it appears at ﬁrst to be only a parent of evil.  Ignorance is a veil that separates the mind, body and life from their source and reality, Sachchidananda.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus obscured the mind feels itself pierced by the evil that Ignorance creates. But the Active Brahman is always Sachchidananda using for its selfbecoming the forms of mind, body and life. All their experiences are therefore seen by It in the terms of Sachchidananda. It is not pierced by the evil. For It also is the One and sees everywhere Oneness.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not mastered by the Ignorance that It uses as a minor term of its conception.  The human soul is one with the Lord; it also is in its completeness Sachchidananda using Ignorance as the minor term of its being. But it has projected its conceptions into this minor term and established there in limited mind its centre of vision, its view-point. It assumes to itself the incompleteness and the resultant sense of want, discord, desire, suffering. The Real Man behind is not affected by all this confusion; but the apparent or exterior Man is affected.


Sri Aurobindo: To recover its freedom it must recover its completeness; it must identify itself with the divine Inhabitant within, its true and complete self. It can then, like the Lord, conduct the action of Prakriti without undergoing the false impression of identiﬁcation with the results of its action. It is this idea on which the Upanishad bases the assertion, “Action cleaveth not to a man.”  To this end it must recover the silent Brahman within. The Lord possesses always His double term and conducts the action of the universe, extended in it, but not attached to or limited by His works.


Sri Aurobindo: The human soul, entangled in mind, is obscured in vision by the rushing stream of Prakriti’s works and fancies itself to be a part of that stream and swept in its currents and in its eddies. It has to go back in its self-existence to the silent Purusha even while participating in its self-becoming in the movement of Prakriti. It becomes, then, not only like the silent Purusha, the witness and upholder, but also the Lord and the free enjoyer of Prakriti and her works. An absolute calm and passivity, purity and equality within, a sovereign and inexhaustible activity without is the nature of Brahman as we see it manifested in the universe.  There is therefore no farther objection to works.


Sri Aurobindo: On the contrary, works are justiﬁed by the participation or selfidentiﬁcation of the soul with the Lord in His double aspect of passivity and activity. Tranquillity for the Soul, activity for the energy, is the balance of the divine rhythm in man.  THE LAW OF THINGS


Sri Aurobindo: The totality of objects () is the becoming of the Lord in the extension of His own being. Its principle is double. There is consciousness; there is Being. Consciousness dwells in energy () upon its self-being to produce Idea of itself () and form and action inevitably corresponding to the Idea. This is the original Indian conception of creation, self-production or projection into form (,).


Sri Aurobindo: Being uses its self-awareness to evolve inﬁnite forms of itself governed by the expansion of the innate Idea in the form. This is the original Indian conception of evolution, prominent in certain philosophies such as the Sankhya (,,). It is the same phenomenon diversely stated.  In the idea of some thinkers the world is a purely subjective evolution (), not real as objective fact; in the idea of others it is an objective fact, a real modiﬁcation (), but one which makes no difference to the essence of Being. Both notions claim to derive from the Upanishads as their authority, and their opposition comes in fact by the separation of what in the ancient Vedanta was viewed as one, — as we see in this passage.


Sri Aurobindo: Brahman is His own subject and His own object, whether in His pure self-existence or in His varied self-becoming. He is the object of His own self-awareness; He is the Knower of His own self-being. The two aspects are inseparable, even though they seem to disappear into each other and emerge again from each other. All appearance of pure subjectivity holds itself as an object implicit in its very subjectivity; all appearance of pure objectivity holds itself as subject implicit in its very objectivity.  All objective existence is the Self-existent, the Self-becoming, “Swayambhu”, becoming by the force of the Idea within it.


Sri Aurobindo: The Idea is, self-contained, the Fact that it becomes. For Swayambhu sees or comprehends Himself in the essence of the Fact as “Kavi”, thinks Himself out in the evolution of its possibilities as “Manishi”, becomes form of Himself in the movement in Space and Time as “Paribhu”. These three are one operation appearing as successive in the relative, temporal and spatial Consciousness.  It follows that every object holds in itself the law of its own being eternally,, from years sempiternal, in perpetual Time. All relations in the totality of objects are thus determined by their Inhabitant, the Self-existent, the Selfbecoming, and stand contained in the nature of things by the omnipresence of the One, the Lord, by His self-vision which is their inherent subjective Truth, by His self-becoming which, against a background of boundless possibilities, is the Law of their inevitable evolution in the objective Fact.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore all things are arranged by Him perfectly, , as they should be in their nature. There is an imperative harmony in the All, which governs the apparent discords of individualisation. That discord would be real and operate in eternal chaos, if there were only a mass of individual forms and forces, if each form and force did not contain in itself and were not in its reality the self-existent All, the Lord.  THE PROCESS OF THINGS  The Lord appears to us in the relative notion of the process of things ﬁrst as Kavi, the Wise, the Seer.


Sri Aurobindo: The Kavi sees the Truth in itself, the truth in its becoming, in its essence, possibilities, actuality. He contains all that in the Idea, the Vijnana, called the Truth and Law, Satyam Ritam. He contains it comprehensively, not piecemeal; the Truth and Law of things is the Brihat, the Large. Viewed by itself, the realm of Vijnana would seem a realm of predetermination, of concentration, of compelling seed-state. But it is a determination not in previous Time, but in perpetual Time; a Fate compelled by the Soul, not compelling it, compelling rather the action and result, present in the expansion of the movement as well as in the concentration of the Idea.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore the truth of the Soul is freedom and mastery, not subjection and bondage. Purusha commands Prakriti, Prakriti does not compel Purusha.  The Manishi takes his stand in the possibilities. He has behind him the freedom of the Inﬁnite and brings it in as a background for the determination of the ﬁnite. Therefore every action in the world seems to emerge from a balancing and clashing of various possibilities.


Sri Aurobindo: None of these, however, are effective in the determination except by their secret consonance with the Law of that which has to become. The Kavi is in the Manishi and upholds him in his working. But viewed by itself the realm of the Manishi would seem to be a state of plasticity, of freewill, of the interaction of forces, but of a free-will in thought which is met by a fate in things.  For the action of the Manishi is meant to eventuate in the becoming of the Paribhu. The Paribhu, called also Virat, extends Himself in the realm of eventualities.


Sri Aurobindo: He fulﬁls what is contained in the Truth, what works out in the possibilities reﬂected by the mind, what appears to us as the fact objectively realised. The realm of Virat would seem, if taken separately, to be that of a Law and Predetermination which compels all things that evolve in that realm, — the iron chain of Karma, the rule of mechanical necessity, the despotism of an inexplicable Law.  But the becoming of Virat is always the becoming of the selfexistent Lord, —. Therefore to realise the truth of that becoming we have to go back and re-embrace all that stands behind; — we have to return to the full truth of the free and inﬁnite Sachchidananda.  This is the truth of things as seen from above and from the Unity.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the divine standpoint; but we have to take account of the human standpoint which starts from below, proceeds from the Ignorance, and perceives these principles successively, not comprehensively, as separate states of consciousness. Humanity is that which returns in experience to Sachchidananda, and it must begin from below, in Avidya, with the mind embodied in Matter, the Thinker imprisoned and emerging from the objective Fact. This imprisoned Thinker is Man, the “Manu”.  He has to start from death and division and arrive at unity and immortality. He has to realise the universal in the individual and the Absolute in the relative.


Sri Aurobindo: He is Brahman growing self-conscious in the objective multiplicity. He is the ego in the cosmos vindicating himself as the All and the Transcendent.   V


Sri Aurobindo: T M  [2 ]  VIDYA AND AVIDYA  All manifestation proceeds by the two terms, Vidya and Avidya, the consciousness of Unity and the consciousness of Multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: They are the two aspects of the Maya, the formative self-conception of the Eternal.  Unity is the eternal and fundamental fact, without which all multiplicity would be unreal and an impossible illusion. The consciousness of Unity is therefore called Vidya, the Knowledge.  Multiplicity is the play or varied self-expansion of the One, shifting in its terms, divisible in its view of itself, by force of which the One occupies many centres of consciousness, inhabits many formations of energy in the universal Movement. Multiplicity is implicit or explicit in unity.


Sri Aurobindo: Without it the Unity would be either a void of non-existence or a powerless, sterile limitation to the state of indiscriminate self-absorption or of blank repose.  But the consciousness of multiplicity separated from the true knowledge in the many of their own essential oneness, — the view-point of the separate ego identifying itself with the divided form and the limited action, — is a state of error and delusion. In man this is the form taken by the consciousness of multiplicity.  Therefore it is given the name of Avidya, the Ignorance.  Brahman, the Lord, is one and all-blissful, but free from limitation by His unity; all-powerful, He is able to conceive Himself from multiple centres in multiple forms from which and upon which ﬂow multiple currents of energy, seen by us as actions or play of forces.


Sri Aurobindo: When He is thus multiple, He is not bound by His multiplicity, but amid all variations dwells eternally in His own oneness. He is Lord of Vidya and Avidya.  They are the two sides of His self-conception (Maya), the twin powers of His Energy (Chit-Shakti).  Brahman, exceeding as well as dwelling in the play of His Maya, is Ish, lord of it and free. Man, dwelling in the play, is Anish, not lord, not free, subject to Avidya.


Sri Aurobindo: But this subjection is itself a play of the Ignorance, unreal in essential fact (), real only in practical relation (), in the working out of the actions of the divine Energy, the Chit-Shakti.  To get back to the essential fact of his freedom he must recover the sense of Oneness, the consciousness of Brahman, of the Lord, realise his oneness in Brahman and with the Lord. Recovering his freedom, realising his oneness with all existences as becomings of the One Being who is always himself (, He am I), he is able to carry out divine actions in the world, no longer subject to the Ignorance, because free in the Knowledge.  The perfection of man, therefore, is the full manifestation of the Divine in the individual through the supreme accord between Vidya and Avidya. Multiplicity must become conscious of its oneness, Oneness embrace its multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: THE EXTREME PATHS  The purpose of the Lord in the world cannot be fulﬁlled by following Vidya alone or Avidya alone.  Those who are devoted entirely to the principle of multiplicity and division and take their orientation away from oneness enter into a blind darkness of Ignorance. For this tendency is one of increasing contraction and limitation, disaggregation of the gains of knowledge and greater and greater subjection to the mechanical necessities of Prakriti and ﬁnally to her separative and self-destructive forces. To turn away from the progression towards Oneness is to turn away from existence and from light.


Sri Aurobindo: Those who are devoted entirely to the principle of indiscriminate Unity and seek to put away from them the integrality of the Brahman, also put away from them knowledge and completeness and enter as if into a greater darkness. They enter into some special state and accept it for the whole, mistaking exclusion in consciousness for transcendence in consciousness.  They ignore by choice of knowledge, as the others are ignorant by compulsion of error. Knowing all to transcend all is the right path of Vidya.  Although a higher state than the other, this supreme Night is termed a greater darkness, because the lower is one of chaos from which reconstitution is always possible, the higher is a conception of Void or Asat, an attachment to non-existence of Self from which it is more difﬁcult to return to fulﬁlment of Self.


Sri Aurobindo: THE GAINS IN EITHER PATH  Pursued with a less entire attachment the paths of Vidya and Avidya have each their legitimate gains for the human soul, but neither of these are the full and perfect thing undertaken by the individual in the manifestation.  By Vidya one may attain to the state of the silent Brahman or the Akshara Purusha regarding the universe without actively participating in it or to His self-absorbed state of Chit in Sat from which the universe proceeds and towards which it returns.  Both these states are conditions of serenity, plenitude, freedom from the confusions and sufferings of the world.  But the highest goal of man is neither fulﬁlment in the movement as a separate individual nor in the Silence separated from the movement, but in the Uttama Purusha, the Lord, He who went abroad and upholds in Himself both the Kshara and the Akshara as modes of His being.


Sri Aurobindo: The self of man, the Jivatman, is here in order to realise in the individual and for the universe that one highest Self of all. The ego created by Avidya is a necessary mechanism for afﬁrming individuality in the universal as a starting-point for this supreme achievement.  By Avidya one may attain to a sort of fullness of power, joy, world-knowledge, largeness of being, which is that of the Titans or of the Gods, of Indra, of Prajapati. This is gained in the path of self-enlargement by an ample acceptance of the multiplicity in all its possibilities and a constant enrichment of the individual by all the materials that the universe can pour into him. But this also is not the goal of man; for though it brings transcendence of the ordinary human limits, it does not bring the divine transcendence of the universe in the Lord of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: One transcends confusion of Ignorance, but not limitation of Knowledge, — transcends death of the body, but not limitation of being, — transcends subjection to sorrow, but not subjection to joy, — transcends the lower Prakriti, but not the higher. To gain the real freedom and the perfect Immortality one would have to descend again to all that had been rejected and make the right use of death, sorrow and ignorance.  The real knowledge is that which perceives Brahman in His integrality and does not follow eagerly after one consciousness rather than another, is no more attached to Vidya than to Avidya. This was the knowledge of the ancient sages who were, steadfast in the gaze of their thought, not drawn away from the completeness of knowledge by one light or by another and whose perception of Brahman was consequently entire and comprehensive and their teaching founded on that perception equally entire and comprehensive (). It is the knowledge handed down from these Ancients that is being set forth in the Upanishad.


Sri Aurobindo: THE COMPLETE PATH   Brahman embraces in His manifestation both Vidya and Avidya and if they are both present in the manifestation, it is because they are both necessary to its existence and its accomplishment.  Avidya subsists because Vidya supports and embraces it; Vidya depends upon Avidya for the preparation and the advance of the soul towards the great Unity. Neither could exist without the other; for if either were abolished, they would both pass away into something which would be neither the one nor the other, something inconceivable and ineffable beyond all manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: In the worst Ignorance there is some point of the knowledge which constitutes that form of Ignorance and some support of Unity which prevents it in its most extreme division, limitation, obscurity from ceasing to exist by dissolving into nothingness.  The destiny of the Ignorance is not that it should be dissolved out of existence, but that its elements should be enlightened, united, that which they strive to express delivered, fulﬁlled and in the fulﬁlment transmuted and transﬁgured.  In the uttermost unity of which knowledge is capable the contents of the Multiplicity are inherent and implicit and can any moment be released into activity. The ofﬁce of Vidya is not to destroy Avidya as a thing that ought never to have been manifested but to draw it continually towards itself, supporting it the while and helping it to deliver itself progressively from that character of Ignorance, of the oblivion of its essential Oneness, which gives it its name.  Avidya fulﬁlled by turning more and more to Vidya enables the individual and the universal to become what the Lord is in Himself, conscious of His manifestation, conscious of His non-manifestation, free in birth, free in non-birth.


Sri Aurobindo: Man represents the point at which the multiplicity in the universe becomes consciously capable of this turning and fulﬁlment.  His own natural fulﬁlment comes by following the complete path of Avidya surrendering itself to Vidya, the Multiplicity to the Unity, the Ego to the One in all and beyond all, and of Vidya accepting Avidya into itself, the Unity fulﬁlling the Multiplicity, the One manifesting Himself unveiled in the individual and in the universe.   MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY  By Avidya fulﬁlled man passes beyond death, by Vidya accepting Avidya into itself he enjoys immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: By death is meant the state of mortality which is a subjection to the process of constant birth and dying as a limited ego bound to the dualities of joy and sorrow, good and evil, truth and error, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering.  This state comes by limitation and self-division from the One who is all and in all and beyond all and by attachment of the idea of self to a single formation in Time and Space of body, life and mind, by which the Self excludes from its view all that it verily is with the exception of a mass of experiences ﬂowing out from and in upon a particular centre and limited by the capacities of a particular mental, vital and bodily frame. This mass of experiences it organises around the ego-centre in the mind and linking them together in Time by a double action of memory, passive in state, active in work, says continually, “This is I.”  The result is that the soul attributes to itself a certain portion only of the play of Prakriti or Chit-Shakti and consequently a certain limited capacity of force of consciousness which has to bear all the impact of what the soul does not regard as itself but as a rush of alien forces; against them it defends its separate formation of individuality from dissolution into Nature or mastery by Nature. It seeks to assert in the individual form and by its means its innate character of Ish or Lord and so to possess and enjoy its world.


Sri Aurobindo: But by the very deﬁnition of the ego its capacity is limited. It accepts as itself a form made of the movement of Nature which cannot endure in the general ﬂux of things. It has to form it by the process of the movement and this is birth, it dissolves it by the process of the movement and this is death.  It can master by the understanding only so much of its experiences as assimilate with its own view-point and in a way which must always be imperfect and subject to error because it is not the view of all or the view-point of the All. Its knowledge is partly error and all the rest it ignores.


Sri Aurobindo: It can only accept and harmonise itself with a certain number of its experiences, precisely because these are the only ones it can understand sufﬁciently to assimilate. This is its joy; the rest is sorrow or indifference.  It is only capable of harmonising with the force in its body, nerves and mind a certain number of impacts of alien forces. In these it takes pleasure. The rest it receives with insensibility or pain.


Sri Aurobindo: Death therefore is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s false self-limitation in the individual frame of mind, life and body.  Error is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s false sufﬁciency in a limited knowledge.  Suffering of mind and body is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s attempt to conﬁne the universal Ananda to a false and self-regarding formation of limited and exclusive enjoyments.  It is only by accepting the oneness of the All that the individual can escape from this constant and necessary denial and attain beyond. Then All-being, All-force, All-consciousness, All-truth, All-delight take possession of the individual soul.


Sri Aurobindo: It changes mortality for immortality.  But the way of attaining to immortality is not by the selfdissolution of the individual formation into the ﬂux of Prakriti, neither is it by prematurely dissolving it into the All-soul which Prakriti expresses. Man moves towards something which fulﬁls the universe by transcending it. He has to prepare his individual soul for the transcendence and for the fulﬁlment.  If Avidya is the cause of mortality, it is also the path out of mortality.


Sri Aurobindo: The limitation has been created precisely in order that the individual may afﬁrm himself against the ﬂux of Prakriti in order eventually to transcend, possess and transform it.  The ﬁrst necessity is therefore for man continually to enlarge himself in being, knowledge, joy, power in the limits of the ego so that he may arrive at the conception of something which progressively manifests itself in him in these terms and becomes more and more powerful to deal with the oppositions of Prakriti and to change, individually, more and more the terms of ignorance, suffering and weakness into the terms of knowledge, joy and power and even death into a means of wider life.  This self-enlargement has then to awaken to the perception of something exceeding itself, exceeding the personal manifestation. Man has so to enlarge his conception of self as to see all in himself and himself in all (). He has to see that this “I” which contains all and is contained in all, is the One, is universal and not his personal ego.


Sri Aurobindo: To That he has to subject his ego, That he has to reproduce in his nature and become, That is what he has to possess and enjoy with an equal soul in all its forms and movements.  He has to see that this universal One is something entirely transcendent, the sole Being, and that the universe and all its forms, actions, egos are only becomings of that Being ().  World is a becoming which seeks always to express in motion of Time and Space, by progression in mind, life and body what is beyond all becoming, beyond Time and Space, beyond mind, life and body.  Thus Avidya becomes one with Vidya. By Avidya man passes beyond that death, suffering, ignorance, weakness which were the ﬁrst terms he had to deal with, the ﬁrst assertions of the One in the birth afﬁrming Himself amid the limitations and divisions of the Multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: By Vidya he enjoys even in the birth the Immortality.  Immortality does not mean survival of the self or the ego after dissolution of the body. The Self always survives the dissolution of the body, because it always pre-existed before the birth of the body. The Self is unborn and undying. The survival of the ego is only the ﬁrst condition by which the individual soul is able to continue and link together its experiences in Avidya so as to pursue with an increasing self-possession and mastery that process of self-enlargement which culminates in Vidya.


Sri Aurobindo: By immortality is meant the consciousness which is beyond birth and death, beyond the chain of cause and effect, beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful, self-existent in consciousbeing, the consciousness of the Lord, of the supreme Purusha, of Sachchidananda.  On this realisation man can base his free activity in the universe.  But having so far attained, what further utility has the soul for birth or for works? None for itself, everything for God and the universe.  Immortality beyond the universe is not the object of manifestation in the universe, for that the Self always possessed.


Sri Aurobindo: Man exists in order that through him the Self may enjoy Immortality in the birth as well as in the non-becoming.  Nor is individual salvation the end; for that would only be the sublime of the ego, not its self-realisation through the Lord in all.  Having realised his own immortality, the individual has yet to fulﬁl God’s work in the universe. He has to help the life, the mind and the body in all beings to express progressively Immortality and not mortality.  This he may do by the becoming in the material body which we ordinarily call birth, or from some status in another world or even, it is possible, from beyond world.


Sri Aurobindo: But birth in the body is the most close, divine and effective form of help which the liberated can give to those who are themselves still bound to the progression of birth in the lowest world of the Ignorance.   VI   T


Sri Aurobindo: M   [ 3 ]


Sri Aurobindo: THE BIRTH AND THE NON-BIRTH The Self outside Nature does not become; it is immutable as well as eternal. The Self in Nature becomes, it changes its states and forms. This entry into various states and forms in the succession of Time is Birth in Nature.  Because of these two positions of the Self, in Nature and out of Nature, moving in the movement and seated above the movement, active in the development and eating the fruits of the tree of Life or inactive and simply regarding, there are two possible states of conscious existence directly opposed to each other of which the human soul is capable, the state of Birth, the state of Non-Birth.


Sri Aurobindo: Man starts from the troubled state of Birth, he arrives at that tranquil poise of conscious existence liberated from the movement which is the Non-Birth. The knot of the Birth is the ego-sense; the dissolution of the ego-sense brings us to the NonBirth. Therefore the Non-Birth is also called the Dissolution (Vinasha).  Birth and Non-Birth are not essentially physical conditions, but soul-states. A man may break the knot of the ego-sense and yet remain in the physical body; but if he concentrates himself solely in the state of dissolution of ego, then he is not born again in the body.


Sri Aurobindo: He is liberated from birth as soon as the present impulse of Nature which continues the action of the mind and body has been exhausted. On the other hand if he attaches himself to the Birth, the ego-principle in him seeks continually to clothe itself in fresh mental and physical forms.  THE EVIL OF THE EXTREMES  Neither attachment to Non-Birth nor attachment to Birth is the perfect way. For all attachment is an act of ignorance and a violence committed upon the Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: Its end also is ignorance, a state of blind darkness.  Exclusive attachment to Non-Birth leads to a dissolution into indiscriminate Nature or into the Nihil, into the Void, and both of these are states of blind darkness. For the Nihil is an attempt not to transcend the state of existence in birth, but to annul it, not to pass from a limited into an illimitable existence, but from existence into its opposite. The opposite of existence can only be the Night of negative consciousness, a state of ignorance and not of release.  On the other hand, attachment to Birth in the body means a constant self-limitation and an interminable round of egoistic births in the lower forms of egoism without issue or release.


Sri Aurobindo: This is, from a certain point of view, a worse darkness than the other; for it is ignorant even of the impulse of release. It is not an error in the grasping after truth, but a perpetual contentment with the state of blindness. It cannot lead even eventually to any greater good, because it does not dream of any higher condition.  THE GOOD OF THE EXTREMES  On the other hand each of these tendencies, pursued with a certain relativeness to the other, has its own fruit and its own good.


Sri Aurobindo: Non-Birth pursued as the goal of Birth and a higher, fuller and truer existence may lead to withdrawal into the silent Brahman or into the pure liberty of the Non-Being. Birth, pursued as a means of progress and self-enlargement, leads to a greater and fuller life which may, in its turn, become a vestibule to the ﬁnal achievement.  THE PERFECT WAY  But neither of these results is perfect in itself nor the true goal of humanity. Each of them brings its intended portion into the perfect good of the human soul only when it is completed by the other.


Sri Aurobindo: Brahman is both Vidya and Avidya, both Birth and NonBirth. The realisation of the Self as the unborn and the poise of the soul beyond the dualities of birth and death in the inﬁnite and transcendent existence are the conditions of a free and divine life in the Becoming. The one is necessary to the other. It is by participation in the pure unity of the Immobile (Akshara) Brahman that the soul is released from its absorption in the stream of the movement. So released it identiﬁes itself with the Lord to whom becoming and non-becoming are only modes of His existence and is able to enjoy immortality in the manifestation without being caught in the wheel of Nature’s delusions.


Sri Aurobindo: The necessity of birth ceases, its personal object having been fulﬁlled; the freedom of becoming remains. For the Divine enjoys equally and simultaneously the freedom of His eternity and the freedom of His becoming.  It may even be said that to have had the conscious experience of a dissolution of the very idea of Being into the supreme NonBeing is necessary for the fullest and freest possession of Being itself. This would be from the synthetic standpoint the justiﬁcation of the great effort of Buddhism to exceed the conception of all positive being even in its widest or purest essentiality.  Thus by dissolution of ego and of the attachment to birth the soul crosses beyond death; it is liberated from all limitation in the dualities.


Sri Aurobindo: Having attained this liberation it accepts becoming as a process of Nature subject to the soul and not binding upon it and by this free and divine becoming enjoys Immortality.  THE JUSTIFICATION OF LIFE  Thus, the third movement of the Upanishad is a justiﬁcation of life and works, which were enjoined upon the seeker of the Truth in its second verse. Works are the essence of Life. Life is a manifestation of the Brahman; in Brahman the Life Principle arranges a harmony of the seven principles of conscious being by which that manifestation works out its involution and evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: In Brahman Matarishwan disposes the waters, the sevenfold movement of the divine Existence. That divine Existence is the Lord who has gone abroad in the movement and unrolled the universe in His three modes as All-Seer of the Truth of things, Thinker-out of their possibilities, Realiser of their actualities.  He has determined all things sovereignly in their own nature, development and goal from years sempiternal.  That determination works out through His double power of Vidya and Avidya, consciousness of essential unity and consciousness of phenomenal multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: The Multiplicity carried to its extreme limit returns upon itself in the conscious individual who is the Lord inhabiting the forms of the movement and enjoying ﬁrst the play of the Ignorance. Afterwards by development in the Ignorance the soul returns to the capacity of Knowledge and enjoys by the Knowledge Immortality.  This Immortality is gained by the dissolution of the limited ego and its chain of births into the consciousness of the unborn and undying, the Eternal, the Lord, the ever-free. But it is enjoyed by a free and divine becoming in the universe and not outside the universe; for there it is always possessed, but here in the material body it is to be worked out and enjoyed by the divine Inhabitant under circumstances that are in appearance the most opposite to its terms, in the life of the individual and in the multiple life of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Life has to be transcended in order that it may be freely accepted; the works of the universe have to be overpassed in order that they may be divinely fulﬁlled.  The soul even in apparent bondage is really free and only plays at being bound; but it has to go back to the consciousness of freedom and possess and enjoy universally not this or that but the Divine and the All.   VII


Sri Aurobindo: F M   [1]  THE WORLDS AFTER DEATH


Sri Aurobindo: In the third verse the Upanishad has spoken of sunless worlds enveloped in blind gloom. In its third movement it also speaks twice of the soul entering into a blind gloom, but here it is a state of consciousness that seems to be indicated and not a world.  Nevertheless, the two statements differ little in effect; for in the Vedantic conception a world is only a condition of conscious being organised in the terms of the seven constituent principles of manifested existence. According to the state of consciousness which we reach here in the body, will be our state of consciousness and the surroundings organised by it when the mental being passes out of the body. For the individual soul out of the body must either disappear into the general constituents of its existence, merge itself into Brahman or persist in an organisation of consciousness other than the terrestrial and in relations with the universe other than those which are appropriate to life in the body.


Sri Aurobindo: This state of consciousness and the relations belonging to it are the other worlds, the worlds after death.   THE THREE STATES  The Upanishad admits three states of the soul in relation to the manifested universe, — terrestrial life by birth in the body, the survival of the individual soul after death in other states and the immortal existence which being beyond birth and death, beyond manifestation can yet enter into forms as the Inhabitant and embrace Nature as its lord. The two former conditions appertain to the Becoming; Immortality stands in the Self, in the Non-Birth, and enjoys the Becoming.


Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishad, although it does not speak expressly of rebirth in an earthly body, yet implies that belief in its thought and language, — especially in the 17th verse. On the basis of this belief in rebirth man may aim at three distinct objects beyond death, — a better or more fortunate life or lives upon earth, eternal enjoyment of bliss in an ultra-terrestrial world of light and joy or a transcendence exclusive of all universal existence, merged in the Supreme as in one’s true self, but having no relation with the actual or possible contents of its inﬁnite consciousness.  REBIRTH  The attainment of a better life or lives upon earth is not the consummation offered to the soul by the thought of the Upanishad.  But it is an important intermediate object so long as the soul is in a state of growth and self-enlargement and has not attained to liberation.


Sri Aurobindo: The obligation of birth and death is a sign that the mental being has not yet uniﬁed itself with its true supramental self and spirit, but is dwelling “in Avidya and enclosed within it”. To attain that union the life of man upon earth is its appointed means. After liberation the soul is free, but may still participate in the entire movement and return to birth no longer for its own sake but for the sake of others and according to the will in it of its divine Self, the Lord of its movement.  HEAVEN AND HELL  The enjoyment of beatitude in a heaven beyond is also not the supreme consummation.


Sri Aurobindo: But Vedantic thought did not envisage rebirth as an immediate entry after death into a new body; the mental being in man is not so rigidly bound to the vital and physical, — on the contrary, the latter are ordinarily dissolved together after death, and there must therefore be, before the soul is attracted back towards terrestrial existence, an interval in which it assimilates its terrestrial experiences in order to be able to constitute a new vital and physical being upon earth. During this interval it must dwell in states or worlds beyond and these may be favourable or unfavourable to its future development. They are favourable in proportion as the light of the Supreme Truth of which Surya is a symbol enters into them, but states of intermediate ignorance or darkness are harmful to the soul in its progress. Those enter into them, as has been afﬁrmed in the third verse, who do hurt to themselves by shutting themselves to the light or distorting the natural course of their development. The Vedantic heavens are states of light and the soul’s expansion; darkness, self-obscuration and self-distortion are the nature of the Hells which it has to shun.


Sri Aurobindo: In relation to the soul’s individual development, therefore, the life in worlds beyond, like the life upon earth, is a means and not an object in itself. After liberation the soul may possess these worlds as it possesses the material birth, accepting in them a means towards the divine manifestation in which they form a condition of its fullness, each being one of the parts in a series of organised states of conscious being which is linked with and supports all the rest.   TRANSCENDENCE  Transcendence is the goal of the development, but it does not exclude the possession of that which is transcended.


Sri Aurobindo: The soul need not and should not push transcendence so far as to aim at its own extinction. Nirvana is extinction of the ego-limitations, but not of all possibility of manifestation, since it can be possessed even in the body.  The desire of the exclusive liberation is the last desire that the soul in its expanding knowledge has to abandon; the delusion that it is bound by birth is the last delusion that it has to destroy.  SURYA AND AGNI


Sri Aurobindo: On the basis of this conception of the worlds and the relation of these different soul-states to each other the Upanishad proceeds to indicate the two lines of knowledge and action which lead to the supreme vision and the divine felicity. This is done under the form of an invocation to Surya and Agni, the Vedic godheads, representative one of the supreme Truth and its illuminations, the other of the divine Will raising, purifying and perfecting human action.  THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS  To understand entirely the place and function of Surya we must enter a little more profoundly into the Vedic conception of the seven worlds and the principles of consciousness they represent.  All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements.


Sri Aurobindo: For what we call a state is only the organisation of a complex movement. This hierarchy is composed by a descending or involutive and an ascending or evolutive movement of which Spirit and Matter are the highest and lowest terms.  Spirit is Sat or pure existence, pure in self-awareness (Chit), pure in self-delight (Ananda). Therefore Spirit can be regarded as a triune basis of all conscious being. There are three terms, but they are really one.


Sri Aurobindo: For all pure existence is in its essence pure self-conscience and all pure self-conscience is in its essence pure self-delight. At the same time our consciousness is capable of separating these three by the Idea and the Word and even of creating for itself in its divided or limited movements the sense of their apparent opposites.  An integral intuition into the nature of conscious being shows us that it is indeed one in essence, but also that it is capable of an inﬁnite potential complexity and multiplicity in self-experience. The working of this potential complexity and multiplicity in the One is what we call from our point of view manifestation or creation or world or becoming — (, ). Without it no world-existence is possible.


Sri Aurobindo: The agent of this becoming is always the self-conscience of the Being. The power by which the self-conscience brings out of itself its potential complexities is termed Tapas, Force or Energy, and, being self-conscious, is obviously of the nature of Will. But not Will as we understand it, something exterior to its object, other than its works, labouring on material outside itself, but Will inherent in the Being, inherent in the becoming, one with the movement of existence, — self-conscious Will that becomes what it sees and knows in itself, Will that is expressed as Force of its own work and formulates itself in the result of its work.  By this Will, Tapas or Chit-Shakti, the worlds are created.  THE HIGHER WORLDS


Sri Aurobindo: All organisation of self-conscient being which takes as its basis the unity of pure existence belongs to the world of the highest creation,, — the worlds of the Spirit.  We can conceive three principal formations.  When Tapas or energy of self-conscience dwells upon Sat or pure existence as its basis, the result is Satyaloka or world of true existence. The soul in Satyaloka is one with all its manifestations by oneness of essence and therefore one in self-conscience and in energy of self-conscience and one also in bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: When Tapas dwells upon active power of Chit as its basis, the result is Tapoloka or world of energy of self-conscience. The soul in Tapoloka is one with all manifestations in this Energy and therefore enjoys oneness also in the totality of their bliss and possesses equally their unity of essence.  When Tapas dwells upon active Delight of being as its basis, the result is Janaloka, world of creative Delight. The soul in Janaloka is one in delight of being with all manifestation and through that bliss one also in conscious energy and in essence of being.  All these are states of consciousness in which unity and multiplicity have not yet been separated from each other.


Sri Aurobindo: All is in all, each in all and all in each, inherently, by the very nature of conscious being and without effort of conception or travail of perception. There is no night, no obscurity. Neither is there, properly speaking, any dominant action of illuminating Surya.  For the whole of consciousness there is self-luminous and needs no light other than itself. The distinct existence of Surya is lost in the oneness of the Lord or Purusha; that luminous oneness is Surya’s most blessed form of all.


Sri Aurobindo: THE LOWER CREATION  In the lower creation also there are three principles, Matter, Life, and Mind. Sat or pure existence appears there as extended substance or Matter; Will or Force appears as Life which is in its nature creative or manifesting Force and that Force is in its nature a self-conscient will involved and obscure in the forms of its creation. It is liberated from the involution and obscurity by delight of being struggling to become conscious of itself in desire and sensation; the result is the emergence of Mind. So at least it appears to us in the ascending or evolutive movement.


Sri Aurobindo: Wherever there is Matter, Life and Mind are present involved or evolving. So also, Life and Mind have some kind of material form as the condition of their activities. These three appear not as triune, owing to their domination by the dividing principle of Avidya, but as triple.  In the organisation of consciousness to which we belong, Tapas dwells upon Matter as its basis. Our consciousness is determined by the divisibility of extended substance in its apparent forms.


Sri Aurobindo: This is Bhurloka, the material world, the world of formal becoming.  But we may conceive of a world in which dynamic Lifeforce with sensation emergent in it is the basis and determines without the gross obstacle of Matter the forms that it shall take.  This organisation of consciousness has for its ﬁeld Bhuvarloka, the worlds of free vital becoming in form.  We may conceive also of an organised state of consciousness in which Mind liberates itself from subjection to material sensation and becoming dominant determines its own forms instead of being itself determined by the forms in which it ﬁnds itself as a result of life evolution. This formation is Swarloka or world of free, pure and luminous mentality.


Sri Aurobindo: In these lower worlds consciousness is normally broken up and divided. The light of Surya, the Truth, is imprisoned in the night of the subconscient or appears only reﬂected in limited centres or with its rays received by those centres and utilised according to their individual nature.  THE INTERMEDIATE WORLD   Between these two creations, linking them together, is the world or organisation of consciousness of which the inﬁnite Truth of things is the foundation.


Sri Aurobindo: There dominant individualisation no longer usurps the all-pervading soul and the foundation of consciousness is its own vast totality arranging in itself individualised movements which never lose the consciousness of their integrality and total oneness with all others. Multiplicity no longer prevails and divides, but even in the complexity of its movements always refers back to essential unity and its own integral totality. This world is therefore called Maharloka or world of large consciousness.  The principle of Maharloka is Vijnana, the Idea. But this Vijnana is intuitional or rather gnostic Idea, not intellectual conception.


Sri Aurobindo: The difference is that intellectual conception not only tends towards form, but determines itself in the form of the idea and once determined distinguishes itself sharply from other conceptions. But pure intuitional or gnostic Idea sees itself in the Being as well as in the Becoming. It is one with the existence which throws out the form as a symbol of itself and it therefore carries with it always the knowledge of the Truth behind the form. It is in its nature self-conscience of the being and power of the One, aware always of its totality, starting therefore from the totality of all existence and perceiving directly its contents.  Its nature is, seeing, not conceiving.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the vision at once of the essence and the image. It is this intuition or gnosis which is the Vedic Truth, the self-vision and all-vision of Surya.  THE LAW OF THE TRUTH  The face of this Truth is covered as with a brilliant shield, as with a golden lid; covered, that is to say, from the view of our human consciousness. For we are mental beings and our highest ordinary mental sight is composed of the concepts and percepts of the mind, which are indeed a means of knowledge, rays of the Truth, but not in their nature truth of existence, only truth of form.


Sri Aurobindo: By them we arrange our knowledge of the appearances of things and try to infer the truth behind. The true knowledge is truth of existence,, not mere truth of form or appearance.  We can only arrive at the true Truth, if Surya works in us to remove this brilliant formation of concepts and percepts and replaces them by the self-vision and all-vision.  For this it is necessary that the law and action of the Truth should be manifested in us. We must learn to see things as they are, see ourselves as we are.


Sri Aurobindo: Our present action is one in which self-knowledge and will are divided. We start with a fundamental falsehood, that we have a separate existence from others and we try to know the relations of separate beings in their separateness and act on the knowledge so formed for an individual utility.  The law of the Truth would work in us if we saw the totality of our existence containing all others, its forms created by the action of the totality, its powers working in and by the action of the totality. Our internal and external action would then well naturally and directly out of our self-existence, out of the very truth of things and not in obedience to an intermediate principle which is in its nature a falsifying reﬂection.


Sri Aurobindo: THE FULFILMENT OF SURYA IN MAN  Nevertheless even in our ordinary action there is the beginning or at least the seed of the Truth which must liberate us. Behind every act and perception there is an intuition, a truth which, if it is continually falsiﬁed in the form, yet preserves itself in the essence and works to lead us by increasing light and largeness to truth in the manifestation. Behind all this travail of differentiation and division there is an insistent unifying tendency which is also continually falsiﬁed in the separate result, but yet leads persistently towards our eventual integrality in knowledge, in being and in will.  Surya is Pushan, fosterer or increaser.


Sri Aurobindo: His work must be to effect this enlargement of the divided self-perception and action of will into the integral will and knowledge. He is sole seer and replacing other forms of knowledge by his unifying vision enables us to arrive ﬁnally at oneness. That intuitive vision of the totality, of one in All and All in one, becomes the ordainer of the right law of action in us, the law of the Truth. For Surya is Yama, the Ordainer or Controller who assures the law, the dharma. Thus we arrive at the fullness of action of the Illuminer in us, accomplish the entirety of the Truth-Consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: We are then able to see that all that is contained in the being of Surya, in the Vijnana which builds up the worlds is becoming of existence in the one existence and one Lord of all becoming, the Purusha, Sachchidananda. All becoming is born in the Being who himself exceeds all becomings and is their Lord, Prajapati.  By the revelation of the vision of Surya the true knowledge is formed. In this formation the Upanishad indicates two successive actions. First, there is an arrangement or marshalling of the rays of Surya, that is to say, the truths concealed behind our concepts and percepts are brought out by separate intuitions of the image and the essence of the image and arranged in their true relations to each other.


Sri Aurobindo: So we arrive at totalities of intuitive knowledge and can ﬁnally go beyond to unity. This is the drawing together of the light of Surya. This double movement is necessitated by the constitution of our minds which cannot, like the original Truth-consciousness, start at once from the totality and perceive its contents from within. The mind can hardly conceive unity except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. Therefore it has to be gradually led from its own manner to that which exceeds it.


Sri Aurobindo: It has to carry out its own characteristic action of arrangement, but with the help and by the operation of the higher faculty, no longer arbitrarily, but following the very action of the Truth of existence itself. Afterwards, by thus gradually correcting the manner of its own characteristic action it can succeed in reversing that characteristic action itself and learn to proceed from the whole to the contents instead of proceeding from “parts” mistaken for entities to an apparent whole which is still a “part” and still mistaken for an entity.  THE ONE EXISTENT  Thus by the action of Surya we arrive at that light of the supreme superconscient in which even the intuitive knowledge of the truth of things based upon the total vision passes into the self-luminous self-vision of the one existent, one in all inﬁnite complexities of a self-experience which never loses its unity or its self-luminousness. This is Surya’s goodliest form of all.


Sri Aurobindo: For it is the supreme Light, the supreme Will, the supreme Delight of existence.  This is the Lord, the Purusha, the self-conscient Being. When we have this vision, there is the integral self-knowledge, the perfect seeing, expressed in the great cry of the Upanishad,.  The Purusha there and there, He am I. The Lord manifests Himself in the movements and inhabits many forms, but it is One who inhabits all.


Sri Aurobindo: This self-conscient being, this real “I” whom the mental being individualised in the form is aware of as his true self — it is He. It is the All; and it is that which transcends the All.  VIII F M  [2]  THE SIDE OF ACTION


Sri Aurobindo: Through Surya then, through the growth of the illumination in the mind which enables it eventually to pass beyond itself, we have the ﬁrst principle of progress from mortality to immortality.  It is by the Sun as a door or gate that the individual, the limited consciousness attains to the full consciousness and life in the one, supreme and all-embracing Soul.  Both consciousness and life are included in the formula of Immortality; Knowledge is incomplete without action. Chit fulﬁls itself by Tapas, Consciousness by energy. And as Surya represents the divine Light, so Agni to the ancient Rishis represented divine Force, Power or Will-in-Consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The prayer to Agni completes the prayer to Surya.  THE INDIVIDUAL WILL  As in knowledge, so in action, unity is the true foundation.  The individual, accepting division as his law, isolating himself in his own egoistic limits, is necessarily mortal, obscure and ignorant in his workings. He follows in his aims and in his methods a knowledge that is personal, governed by desire, habits of thought, obscure subconscious impulses or, at best, a broken partial and shifting light.


Sri Aurobindo: He lives by rays and not in the full blaze of the Sun. His knowledge is narrow in its objectivity, narrow in its subjectivity, in neither one with the integral knowledge and the total working and total will in the universe. His action, therefore, is crooked, many-branching, hesitating and ﬂuctuating in its impulsion and direction; it beats about among falsehoods to ﬁnd the Truth, tosses or scrapes fragments together to piece out the whole, stumbles among errors and sins to ﬁnd the right.  Being neither one-visioned nor whole-visioned, having neither the totality of the universal Will nor the concentrated oneness of the transcendent, the individual will cannot walk straight on the right or good path towards the Truth and the Immortality.  Governed by desire, exposed to the shock of the forces around it with which its egoism and ignorance forbid it to put itself in harmony, it is subject to the twin children of the Ignorance, suffering and falsehood.


Sri Aurobindo: Not having the divine Truth and Right, it cannot have the divine Felicity.  AGNI, THE DIVINE WILL  But as there is in and behind all the falsehoods of our material mind and reason a Light that prepares by this twilight the full dawn of the Truth in man, so there is in and behind all our errors, sins and stumblings a secret Will, tending towards Love and Harmony, which knows where it is going and prepares and combines our crooked branchings towards the straight path which will be the ﬁnal result of their toil and seeking. The emergence of this Will and that Light is the condition of immortality.  This Will is Agni.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni is in the Rig Veda, from which the closing verse of the Upanishad is taken, the ﬂame of the Divine Will or Force of Consciousness working in the worlds.  He is described as the immortal in mortals, the leader of the journey, the divine Horse that bears us on the road, the “son of crookedness” who himself knows and is the straightness and the Truth. Concealed and hard to seize in the workings of this world because they are all falsiﬁed by desire and egoism, he uses them to transcend them and emerges as the universal in Man or universal Power, Agni Vaishwanara, who contains in himself all the gods and all the worlds, upholds all the universal workings and ﬁnally fulﬁls the godhead, the Immortality. He is the worker of the divine Work. It is these symbols which govern the sense of the two ﬁnal verses of the Upanishad.


Sri Aurobindo: THE IMMORTAL LIFE-PRINCIPLE   Life is the condition from which the Will and the Light emerge. It is said in the Veda that Vayu or Matarishwan, the Life-principle, is he who brings down Agni from Surya in the high and far-off supreme world. Life calls down the divine Will from the Truthconsciousness into the realm of mind and body to prepare here, in Life, its own manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni, enjoying and devouring the things of Life, generates the Maruts, nervous forces of Life that become forces of thought; they, upheld by Agni, prepare the action of Indra, the luminous Mind, who is for our life-powers their Rishi or ﬁnder of the Truth and Right. Indra slays Vritra, the Coverer, dispels the darkness, causes Surya to rise upon our being and go abroad over its whole ﬁeld with the rays of the Truth. Surya is the Creator or manifester, Savitri, who manifests in this mortal world the world or state of immortality, dispels the evil dream of egoism, sin and suffering and transforms Life into the Immortality, the good, the beatitude. The Vedic gods are a parable of human life emerging, mounting, lifting itself towards the Godhead.  Life, body, action, will, these are our ﬁrst materials.


Sri Aurobindo: Matter supplies us with the body; but it is only a temporary knot of the movement, a dwelling-place of the Purusha in which he presides over the activities generated out of the Life-principle. Once it is thrown aside by the Life-principle it is dissolved; ashes are its end. Therefore the body is not ourselves, but only an outer tool and instrument. For Matter is the principle of obscurity and division, of birth and death, of formation and dissolution. It is the assertion of death.


Sri Aurobindo: Immortal man must not identify himself with the body.  The Life-principle in us survives. It is the immortal Breath or, as the phrase really means, the subtle force of existence which is superior to the principle of birth and death. At ﬁrst sight it may appear that birth and death are attributes of the Life, but it is not really so: birth and death are processes of Matter, of the body.  The Life-principle is not formed and dissolved in the formulation and dissolution of the body; if that were so, there could be no continuity of the individual existence and all would go back at death into the formless.


Sri Aurobindo: Life forms body, it is not formed by it. It is the thread upon which the continuity of our successive bodily lives is arranged, precisely because it is itself immortal.  It associates itself with the perishable body and carries forward the mental being, the Purusha in the mind, upon his journey.  WILL AND MEMORY  This journey consists in a series of activities continued from life to life in this world with intervals of life in other states.


Sri Aurobindo: The Life-principle maintains them; it supplies their material in the formative energy which takes shape in them. But their presiding god is not the Life-principle; it is the Will. Will is Kratu, the effective power behind the act. It is of the nature of consciousness; it is energy of consciousness, and although present in all forms, conscious, subconscious or superconscious, vital, physical or mental, yet comes into its kingdom only when it emerges in Mind. It uses the mental faculty of memory to link together and direct consciously the activities towards the goal of the individual.


Sri Aurobindo: In man the use of consciousness by the mental will is imperfect, because memory is limited. Our action is both dispersed and circumscribed because mentally we live from hour to hour in the current of Time, holding only to that which attracts or seems immediately useful to our egoistic mind. We live in what we are doing, we do not control what has been done, but are rather controlled by our past works which we have forgotten.  This is because we dwell in the action and its fruits instead of living in the soul and viewing the stream of action from behind it. The Lord, the true Will, stands back from the actions and therefore is their lord and not bound by them.


Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishad solemnly invokes the Will to remember the thing that has been done, so as to contain and be conscious of the becoming, so as to become a power of knowledge and self-possession and not only a power of impulsion and selfformulation. It will thus more and more approximate itself to the true Will and preside over the co-ordination of the successive lives with a conscious control. Instead of being carried from life to life in a crooked path, as by winds, it will be able to proceed more and more straight in an ordered series, linking life to life with an increasing force of knowledge and direction until it becomes the fully conscious Will moving with illumination on the straight path towards the immortal felicity. The mental will, , becomes what it at present only represents, the divine Will, Agni.  WILL AND KNOWLEDGE


Sri Aurobindo: The essentiality of the divine Will is that in it Consciousness and Energy, Knowledge and Force are one. It knows all manifestations, all things that take birth in the worlds. It is Jatavedas, that which has right knowledge of all births. It knows them in the law of their being, in their relation to other births, in their aim and method, in their process and goal, in their unity with all and their difference from all. It is this divine Will that conducts the universe; it is one with all the things that it combines and its being, its knowledge, its action are inseparable from each other.


Sri Aurobindo: What it is, it knows; what it knows, that it does and becomes.  But as soon as egoistic consciousness emerges and interferes, there is a disturbance, a division, a false action. Will becomes an impulsion ignorant of its secret motive and aim, knowledge becomes a dubious and partial ray not in possession of the will, the act and the result, but only striving to possess and inform them. This is because we are not in possession of our self, our true being, but only of the ego. What we are, we know not; what we know, we cannot effect.


Sri Aurobindo: For knowledge is real and action in harmony with true knowledge only when they proceed naturally out of the conscious, illumined and self-possessing soul, in which being, knowledge and action are one movement.   SURRENDER TO THE DIVINE WILL   This is the change that happens when, the mental will approximating more and more to the divine, Agni burns out in us.


Sri Aurobindo: It is that increasing knowledge and force which carries us ﬁnally into the straight or good path out of the crookedness. It is the divine Will, one with the divine knowledge, which leads us towards felicity, towards the state of Immortality. All that belongs to the deviations of the ego, all that obscures and drives or draws us into this or that false path with its false lures and stumblings are put away from us by it. These things fall away from the divinised Will and cease to ﬁnd lodging in our consciousness.  Therefore the sign of right action is the increasing and ﬁnally the complete submission of the individual to the divine Will which the illumination of Surya reveals in him.


Sri Aurobindo: Although manifested in his consciousness, this Will is not individual. It is the will of the Purusha who is in all things and transcends them.  It is the will of the Lord.  Knowledge of the Lord as the One in the fully self-conscious being, submission to the Lord as the universal and transcendent in the fully self-conscious action, are the two keys of the divine gates, the gates of Immortality.  And the nature of the two united is an illuminated Devotion which accepts, aspires to and fulﬁls God in the human existence.


Sri Aurobindo: CONCLUSION  Thus the fourth movement indicates psychologically the double process of that attainment of Immortality which is the subject of the third movement, the state of bliss and truth within and the worlds of Light after death culminating in the identity of the self-luminous One. At the same time it particularises under the cover of Vedic symbols the process of that self-knowledge and identiﬁcation with the Self and all its becomings which is the subject of the second movement and of that liberated action in the assertion of which the ﬁrst culminates. It is thus a ﬁtting close and consummation to the Upanishad.  IX HE ISHA Upanishad is one of the more ancient of the Vedantic writings in style, substance and versiﬁcation, subsequent certainly to the Chhandogya, Brihadaranyaka and perhaps to the Taittiriya and Aitareya, but certainly the most antique of the extant metrical Upanishads.


Sri Aurobindo: Upanishadic thought falls naturally into two great periods; in one, the earlier, it still kept close to its Vedic roots, reﬂected the old psychological system of the Vedic Rishis and preserved what may be called their spiritual pragmatism; in the other and later, in which the form and thought became more modern and independent of early symbols and origins, some of the principal elements of Vedic thought and psychology begin to be omitted or to lose their previous connotation and the foundations of the later ascetic and anti-pragmatic Vedanta begin to appear. The Isha belongs to the earlier or Vedic group. It is already face to face with the problem of reconciling human life and activity with the Monistic standpoint and its large solution of the difﬁculty is one of the most interesting passages of Vedantic literature. It is the sole Upanishad which offered almost insuperable difﬁculties to the extreme illusionism and anti-pragmatism of Shankaracharya and it was even, for this reason, excised from the list of authoritative Upanishads by one of his greatest followers.  THE PRINCIPLE OF THE UPANISHAD


Sri Aurobindo: The principle it follows throughout is the uncompromising reconciliation of uncompromising extremes. Later thought took one series of terms, — the World, Enjoyment, Action, the Many, Birth, the Ignorance, — and gave them a more and more secondary position, exalting the opposite series, God, Renunciation, Quietism, the One, Cessation of Birth, the Knowledge, until this trend of thought culminated in Illusionism and the idea of existence in the world as a snare and a meaningless burden imposed inexplicably on the soul by itself, which must be cast aside as soon as possible. It ended in a violent cutting of the knot of the great enigma. This Upanishad tries instead to get hold of the extreme ends of the knots, disengage and place them alongside of each other in a release that will be at the same time a right placing and relation. It will not qualify or subordinate unduly any of the extremes, although it recognises a dependence of one on the other.


Sri Aurobindo: Renunciation is to go to the extreme, but also enjoyment is to be equally integral; Action has to be complete and ungrudging, but also freedom of the soul from its works must be absolute; Unity utter and absolute is the goal, but this absoluteness has to be brought to its highest term by including in it the whole inﬁnite multiplicity of things.  So great is this scruple in the Upanishad that having so expressed itself in the formula “By the Ignorance having crossed over death by the Knowledge one enjoys Immortality” that Life in the world might be interpreted as only a preliminary to an existence beyond, it at once rights the balance by reversing the order in the parallel formula “By dissolution having crossed over death by birth one enjoys Immortality”, and thus makes life itself the ﬁeld of the immortal existence which is the goal and aspiration of all life. In this conclusion it agrees with the early Vedic thought which believed all the worlds and existence and non-existence and death and life and immortality to be here in the embodied human being, there evolvent, there realisable and to be possessed and enjoyed, not dependent either for acquisition or enjoyment on the renunciation of life and bodily existence. This thought has never entirely passed out of Indian philosophy, but has become secondary and a side admission not strong enough to qualify seriously the increasing assertion of the extinction of mundane existence as the condition of our freedom and our sole wise and worthy aim.


Sri Aurobindo: THE OPPOSITES  The pairs of opposites successively taken up by the Upanishad and resolved are, in the order of their succession: 1. The Conscious Lord and phenomenal Nature.  2. Renunciation and Enjoyment.  3. Action in Nature and Freedom in the Soul.


Sri Aurobindo: 4. The One stable Brahman and the multiple Movement.  5. Being and Becoming.  6. The Active Lord and the indifferent Akshara Brahman.  7. Vidya and Avidya.


Sri Aurobindo: 8. Birth and Non-Birth.  9. Works and Knowledge.  These discords are thus successively resolved:  GOD AND NATURE  1. Phenomenal Nature is a movement of the conscious Lord.


Sri Aurobindo: The object of the movement is to create forms of His consciousness in motion in which He as the one Soul in many bodies can take up his habitation and enjoy the multiplicity and the movement with all their relations.  ENJOYMENT AND RENUNCIATION  2. Real integral enjoyment of all this movement and multiplicity in its truth and in its inﬁnity depends upon an absolute renunciation; but the renunciation intended is an absolute renunciation of the principle of desire founded on the principle of egoism and not a renunciation of world-existence. This solution depends on the idea that desire is only an egoistic and vital deformation of the divine Ananda or delight of being from which the world is born; by extirpation of ego and desire Ananda again becomes the conscious principle of existence. This substitution is the essence of the change from life in death to life in immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: The enjoyment of the inﬁnite delight of existence free from ego, founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant by the enjoyment of Immortality.  ACTION AND FREEDOM 3. Actions are not inconsistent with the soul’s freedom. Man is not bound by works, but only seems to be bound. He has to recover the consciousness of his inalienable freedom by recovering the consciousness of unity in the Lord, unity in himself, unity with all existence.


Sri Aurobindo: This done, life and works can and should be accepted in their fullness; for the manifestation of the Lord in life and works is the law of our being and the object of our world-existence.  THE QUIESCENCE AND THE MOVEMENT  4. What then of the Quiescence of the Supreme Being and how is persistence in the Movement compatible with that Quiescence which is generally recognised as an essential condition of the supreme Bliss?


Sri Aurobindo: The Quiescence and the Movement are equally one Brahman and the distinction drawn between them is only a phenomenon of our consciousness. So it is with the idea of space and time, the far and the near, the subjective and the objective, internal and external, myself and others, one and many. Brahman, the real existence, is all these things to our consciousness, but in itself ineffably superior to all such practical distinctions. The Movement is a phenomenon of the Quiescence, the Quiescence itself may be conceived as a Movement too rapid for the gods, that is to say, for our various functions of consciousness to follow in its real nature. But it is no formal, material, spatial, temporal movement, only a movement in consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Knowledge sees it all as one, Ignorance divides and creates oppositions where there is no opposition but simply relations of one consciousness in itself. The ego in the body says, “I am within, all else is outside; and in what is outside, this is near to me in Time and Space, that is far.” All this is true in present relation; but in essence it is all one indivisible movement of Brahman which is not material movement but a way of seeing things in the one consciousness.  BEING AND BECOMING 5. Everything depends on what we see, how we look at existence in our soul’s view of things.


Sri Aurobindo: Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness. We have to see the One Being, but we have not to cease to see the many Becomings, for they exist and are included in Brahman’s view of Himself. Only, we must see with knowledge and not with ignorance. We have to realise our true self as the one unchangeable, indivisible Brahman.  We have to see all becomings as developments of the movement in our true self and this self as one inhabiting all bodies and not our body only.


Sri Aurobindo: We have to be consciously, in our relations with this world, what we really are, — this one self becoming everything that we observe. All the movement, all energies, all forms, all happenings we must see as those of our one and real self in many existences, as the play of the Will and Knowledge and Delight of the Lord in His world-existence.  We shall then be delivered from egoism and desire and the sense of separate existence and therefore from all grief and delusion and shrinking; for all grief is born of the shrinking of the ego from the contacts of existence, its sense of fear, weakness, want, dislike, etc.; and this is born from the delusion of separate existence, the sense of being my separate ego exposed to all these contacts of so much that is not myself.  Get rid of this, see oneness everywhere, be the One manifesting Himself in all creatures; ego will disappear; desire born of the sense of not being this, not having that, will disappear; the free inalienable delight of the One in His own existence will take the place of desire and its satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Immortality will be yours, death born of division will be overcome.


Sri Aurobindo: THE ACTIVE AND INACTIVE BRAHMAN  6. The Inactive and the Active Brahman are simply two aspects of the one Self, the one Brahman, who is the Lord. It is He who has gone abroad in the movement. He maintains Himself free from all modiﬁcations in His inactive existence.


Sri Aurobindo: The inaction is the basis of the action and exists in the action; it is His freedom from all He does and becomes and in all He does and becomes. These are the positive and negative poles of one indivisible consciousness. We embrace both in one quiescence and one movement, inseparable from each other, dependent on each other. The quiescence exists relatively to the movement, the movement to the quiescence. He is beyond both.


Sri Aurobindo: This is a different point of view from that of the identity of the Movement and Quiescence which are one in reality; it expresses rather their relation in our consciousness once they are admitted as a practical necessity of that consciousness. It is obvious that we also by becoming one with the Lord would share in this biune conscious existence.  VIDYA AND AVIDYA  7. The knowledge of the One and the knowledge of the Many are a result of the movement of the one consciousness, which sees all things as One in their truth-Idea but differentiates them in their mentality and formal becoming.


Sri Aurobindo: If the mind (Manishi) absorbs itself in God as the formal becoming (Paribhu) and separates itself from God in the true Idea (Kavi), then it loses Vidya, the knowledge of the One, and has only the knowledge of the Many which becomes no longer knowledge at all but ignorance, Avidya. This is the cause of the separate ego-sense.  Avidya is accepted by the Lord in the Mind (Manishi) in order to develop individual relations to their utmost in all the possibilities of division and its consequences and then through these individual relations to come back individually to the knowledge of the One in all. That knowledge has remained all along unabrogated in the consciousness of the true seer or Kavi. This seer in ourselves stands back from the mental thinker; the latter, thus separated, has to conquer death and division by a developing experience as the individual Inhabitant and ﬁnally to recover by the reunited knowledge of the One and the Many the state of Immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: This is our proper course and not either to devote ourselves exclusively to the life of Avidya or to reject it entirely for motionless absorption in the One.  BIRTH AND NON-BIRTH 8. The reason for this double movement of the Thinker is that we are intended to realise immortality in the Birth. The self is uniform and undying and in itself always possesses immortality.  It does not need to descend into Avidya and Birth to get that immortality of Non-Birth; for it possesses it always.


Sri Aurobindo: It descends in order to realise and possess it as the individual Brahman in the play of world-existence. It accepts Birth and Death, assumes the ego and then dissolving the ego by the recovery of unity realises itself as the Lord, the One, and Birth as only a becoming of the Lord in mental and formal being; this becoming is now governed by the true sight of the Seer and, once this is done, becoming is no longer inconsistent with Being, birth becomes a means and not an obstacle to the enjoyment of immortality by the lord of this formal habitation. This is our proper course and not to remain for ever in the chain of birth and death, nor to ﬂee from birth into a pure non-becoming. The bondage does not consist in the physical act of becoming, but in the persistence of the ignorant sense of the separate ego. The Mind creates the chain and not the body.


Sri Aurobindo: WORKS AND KNOWLEDGE  9. The opposition between works and knowledge exists as long as works and knowledge are only of the egoistic mental character. Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. Mental thought is not knowledge, it is a golden lid placed over the face of the Truth, the Sight, the divine Ideation, the Truth-Consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought, the all-embracing truth-ideation, Mahas, Veda, Drishti, replaces the fragmentary mental activity.  True Buddhi (Vijnana) emerges from the dissipated action of the Buddhi which is all that is possible on the basis of the sensemind, the Manas. Vijnana leads us to pure knowledge (Jnana), pure consciousness (Chit). There we realise our entire identity with the Lord in all at the very roots of our being.  But in Chit, Will and Seeing are one.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore in Vijnana or truth-ideation also which comes luminously out of Chit, Will and Sight are combined and no longer as in the mind separated from each other. Therefore when we have the sight and live in the truth-consciousness, our will becomes the spontaneous law of the truth in us and, knowing all its acts and their sense and objective, leads straight to the human goal, which was always the enjoyment of the Ananda, the Lord’s delight in self-being, the state of Immortality. In our acts also we become one with all beings and our life grows into a representation of oneness, truth and divine joy and no longer proceeds on the crooked path of egoism full of division, error and stumbling. In a word, we attain to the object of our existence which is to manifest in itself whether on earth in a terrestrial body and against the resistance of Matter or in the worlds beyond or enter beyond all world the glory of the divine Life and the divine Being.


Sri Aurobindo: MODERN Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. This kind of science would explain history and social development as much as possible by economic necessity or motive, — by economy understood in its widest sense. There are even historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working of the idea and the inﬂuence of the thinker in the development of human institutions.


Sri Aurobindo: The French Revolution, it is thought, would have happened just as it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even if Rousseau and Voltaire had never written and the eighteenth-century philosophic movement in the world of thought had never worked out its bold and radical speculations.  Recently, however, the all-sufﬁciency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneﬁcent and disastrous, a ﬁrst psychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an original intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new ﬁeld are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classiﬁed and organised phenomena much more successfully than it explained them.


Sri Aurobindo: Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth while following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience.  The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed. Obviously, such classiﬁcations are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving.  But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the Western thinker’s own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if we examine their intrinsic sense and value, may yet throw some light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be most useful to investigate.  Undoubtedly, wherever we can seize human society in what to us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages, — no matter whether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically advanced or backward, — we do ﬁnd a strongly symbolic mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and institutions.


Sri Aurobindo: Symbolic, but of what? We ﬁnd that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together. When man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age of symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are losing their virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities, — the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic inﬂuences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the least intervene in its movements.


Sri Aurobindo: If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacriﬁce governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacriﬁce is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacriﬁce except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig Veda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic ages.


Sri Aurobindo: Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Sury¯a, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely by the divine and mystic ﬁgure and is spoken of in the terms of that ﬁgure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior ﬁgure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things. This symbolism inﬂuenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.  We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice, — even as this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea, — to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship.  Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of the fourfold order,, miscalled the system of the four castes, — for caste is a conventional, a symbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes.


Sri Aurobindo: Very possibly; but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisﬁed when we have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and looked always ﬁrst and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological signiﬁcance. This appears in the Purushasukta of the Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical ﬁgures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Sury¯a, would have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline.


Sri Aurobindo: We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefathers and it is therefore that we can ﬁnd in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in God’s house commissioned not to spin ﬁctions but to image difﬁcult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artiﬁce of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superﬁcial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creator’s body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality.