Sri Aurobindo: I had intended to do it later on, but had not time to ﬁnish the remaining articles.  Undoubtedly, that of man himself. The harmony of his faculties is the condition of his peace, their mutual understanding and helpfulness the means of his perfection. At war, they distract the kingdom of his being; the victory of one at the expense of another maims his self-fulﬁlment.  The peculiar character of our age is the divorce that has been pronounced between reason and faith, the logical mind and the intuitive heart.


Sri Aurobindo: At ﬁrst, the declaration of war between them was attended by painful struggles, a faith disturbed or a scepticism dissatisﬁed. But now their divorce has created exaggerated tendencies which impoverish human life by their mutual exclusiveness, on the one side a negative and destructive critical spirit, on the other an imaginative sentiment which opposes pure instinct and a faith founded on dreams to the sterile fanaticism of the intellect.  Yet a real divorce is impossible. Science could not move a step without faith and intuition and today it is growing full of dreams. Religion could not stand for a moment if it did not support itself by the intellectual presentation, however inadequate, of profound truths.


Sri Aurobindo: Today we see it borrowing many of its weapons from the armoury of its opponent. But a right synthesis in virtue of a higher and reconciling truth can alone dissipate their mutual misunderstandings and restore to the race its integral self-development.  The synthesis then of religious aspiration and scientiﬁc faculty, as a beginning; and in the resultant progress an integrality also of the inner existence. Love and knowledge, the delight of the Bhakta and the divine science of the knower of Brahman, have to effect their unity; and both have to recover the fullness of Life which they tend to banish from them in the austerity of their search or the rapture of their ecstasy.  The heart and the mind are one universal Deity and neither a mind without a heart nor a heart without a mind is the human ideal.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor is any perfection sound and real unless it is also fruitful. The integral divine harmony within, but as its result a changed earth and a nobler and happier humanity.  The question has been put from more than one point of view.   To most European readers the name ﬁguring on our cover is likely to be a hieroglyph which attracts or repels according to the temperament.


Sri Aurobindo: Indians know the word, but it has lost for them the signiﬁcance which it bore to their forefathers. Western Philology has converted it into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations ﬁx different values. Now, even among the philologists, some are beginning to recognise that the word in its original use expressed not a difference of race, but a difference of culture. For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration. The Aryan gods were the supraphysical powers who assisted the mortal in his struggle towards the nature of the godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable.  In later times, the word Arya expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candour, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness for knowledge, respect for the wise and learned, the social accomplishments. It was the combined ideal of the Brahmana and the Kshatriya. Everything that departed from this ideal, everything that tended towards the ignoble, mean, obscure, rude, cruel or false, was termed un-Aryan. There is no word in human speech that has a nobler history.


Sri Aurobindo: In the early days of comparative Philology, when the scholars sought in the history of words for the prehistoric history of peoples, it was supposed that the word Arya came from the root , to plough, and that the Vedic Aryans were so called when they separated from their kin in the north-west who despised the pursuits of agriculture and remained shepherds and hunters.  This ingenious speculation has little or nothing to support it.  But in a sense we may accept the derivation. Whoever cultivates the ﬁeld that the Supreme Spirit has made for him, his earth of plenty within and without, does not leave it barren or allow it to run to seed, but labours to exact from it its full yield, is by that effort an Aryan.


Sri Aurobindo: If Arya were a purely racial term, a more probable derivation would be, meaning strength or valour, from, to ﬁght, whence we have the name of the Greek war-god Ares,, brave or warlike, perhaps even, virtue, signifying, like the Latin, ﬁrst, physical strength and courage and then moral force and elevation. This sense of the word also we may accept.  “We ﬁght to win sublime Wisdom, therefore men call us warriors.” For Wisdom implies the choice as well as the knowledge of that which is best, noblest, most luminous, most divine. Certainly, it means also the knowledge of all things and charity and reverence for all things, even the most apparently mean, ugly or dark, for the sake of the universal Deity who chooses to dwell equally in all.


Sri Aurobindo: But, also, the law of right action is a choice, the preference of that which expresses the godhead to that which conceals it. And the choice entails a battle, a struggle. It is not easily made, it is not easily enforced.   Whoever makes that choice, whoever seeks to climb from level to level up the hill of the divine, fearing nothing, deterred by no retardation or defeat, shrinking from no vastness because it is too vast for his intelligence, no height because it is too high for his spirit, no greatness because it is too great for his force and courage, he is the Aryan, the divine ﬁghter and victor, the noble man,, best, the of the Gita.


Sri Aurobindo: Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the ﬁrst law of his nature. He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limitations. He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions.


Sri Aurobindo: He overcomes the mind and its habits, he does not live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions, but knows how to seek and choose, to be large and ﬂexible in intelligence even as he is ﬁrm and strong in his will. For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom.  Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulﬁls. He knows that the body, life and mind are given him in order to attain to something higher than they; therefore they must be transcended and overcome, their limitations denied, the absorption of their gratiﬁcations rejected.


Sri Aurobindo: But he knows also that the Highest is something which is no nullity in the world, but increasingly expresses itself here, — a divine Will, Consciousness, Love, Beatitude which pours itself out, when found, through the terms of the lower life on the ﬁnder and on all in his environment that is capable of receiving it. Of that he is the servant, lover and seeker. When it is attained, he pours it forth in work, love, joy and knowledge upon mankind. For always the Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it.


Sri Aurobindo: He avoids no difﬁculty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue.  Always he ﬁghts for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.  The Aryan perfected is the Arhat. There is a transcendent Consciousness which surpasses the universe and of which all these worlds are only a side-issue and a by-play. To that consciousness he aspires and attains.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a Consciousness which, being transcendent, is yet the universe and all that the universe contains. Into that consciousness he enlarges his limited ego; he becomes one with all beings and all inanimate objects in a single self-awareness, love, delight, all-embracing energy.  There is a consciousness which, being both transcendental and universal, yet accepts the apparent limitations of individuality for work, for various standpoints of knowledge, for the play of the Lord with His creations; for the ego is there that it may ﬁnally convert itself into a free centre of the divine work and the divine play. That consciousness too he has sufﬁcient love, joy and knowledge to accept; he is puissant enough to effect that conversion. To embrace individuality after transcending it is the last and divine sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: The perfect Arhat is he who is able to live simultaneously in all these three apparent states of existence, elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower, so that he may represent perfectly in the symbols of the world that with which he is identiﬁed in all parts of his being, — the triple and triune Brahman.  The difﬁculty our correspondent ﬁnds is in an apparent conﬂict of authorities, as sometimes meditation is recommended in the form of a concentrated succession of thoughts on a single subject, sometimes in the exclusive concentration of the mind on a single image, word or idea, a ﬁxed contemplation rather than meditation. The choice between these two methods and others, for there are others, depends on the object we have in view in Yoga.  The thinking mind is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self-organisation of our internal existence. But in most men thought is a confused drift of ideas, sensations and impressions which arrange themselves as best they can under the stress of a succession of immediate interests and utilities.


Sri Aurobindo: In accordance with the general method of Nature much is used as waste material and only a small portion selected for deﬁnite and abiding formations. And as in physical Nature, so here the whole process is governed by laws which we rather suffer than use or control.  The concentration of thought is used by the Rajayogins to gain freedom and control over the workings of mind, just as the processes of governed respiration and ﬁxed posture are used by the Hathayogins to gain freedom and control over the workings of the body and the vital functions.  By meditation we correct the restless wandering of the mind and train it like an athlete to economise all its energies and ﬁx them on the attainment of some desirable knowledge or selfdiscipline. This is done normally by men in ordinary life, but Yoga takes this higher working of Nature and carries it to its full possibilities.


Sri Aurobindo: It takes note of the fact that by ﬁxing the mind luminously on a single object of thought, we awaken a response in general Consciousness which proceeds to satisfy the mind by pouring into it knowledge about that object or even reveals to us its central or its essential truth. We awaken also a response of Power which gives us in various ways an increasing mastery over the workings of that on which we meditate or enables us to create it and make it active in ourselves. Thus by ﬁxing the mind on the idea of Divine Love, we can come to the knowledge of that principle and its workings, put ourselves into communion with it, create it in ourselves and impose its law on the heart and the senses.  In Yoga concentration is used also for another object, — to retire from the waking state, which is a limited and superﬁcial condition of our consciousness, into the depths of our being measured by various states of Samadhi. For this process contemplation of the single object, idea or name is more powerful than the succession of concentrated thoughts.


Sri Aurobindo: The latter, however, is capable, by bringing us into indirect but waking communion with the deeper states of being, of preparing an integral Samadhi. Its characteristic utility, however, is the luminous activity of formative thought brought under the control of the Purusha by which the rest of the consciousness is governed, ﬁlled with higher and wider ideas, changed rapidly into the mould of those ideas and so perfected. Other and greater utilities lie beyond, but they belong to a later stage of selfdevelopment.  In the Yoga of Devotion, both processes are equally used to concentrate the whole being or to saturate the whole nature with thoughts of the object of devotion, its forms, its essence, its attributes and the joys of adoration and union.  Thought is then made the servant of Love, a preparer of Beatitude.


Sri Aurobindo: In the Yoga of Knowledge meditation is similarly used for discrimination of the True from the apparent, the Self from its forms, and concentrated contemplation for communion and entry of the individual consciousness into the Brahman.   An integral Yoga would harmonise all these aims. It would have also at its disposal other processes for the utilisation of thought and the mastery of the mind.  The question is one of great interest but impossible to solve definitely for lack of substantial data.


Sri Aurobindo: All one can do is to speculate on the most probable and satisfying explanation.  In the ﬁrst place, it is evident that these differences are no mere accident nor the result of some trivial and local cause; for they coincide with great cultural divisions of humanity belonging to prehistoric times. It is the races called Aryan from their common original culture whose script is directed from left to right; the Mesopotamian races deriving their culture from the Chaldeans proceed from right to left; the Mongolians write vertically.  In the second place no explanation is possible if we adopt the view that writing is a comparatively recent invention in the history of the human race and borrowed by all the ancient nations from a common source, — a derivation, let us say, from Egyptian hieroglyphs popularised and spread broadcast over earth by the commercial activities of Phoenician traders. We must suppose on the contrary that these differences were developed at a very early time while the great cultures were in their formation and before the dispersal of the races representing them.


Sri Aurobindo: Undoubtedly, the general use of writing is a late development in the history of the present cycle of civilisation. And to this retardation two causes contributed, at ﬁrst, the absence of a simple and easy system and, afterwards, the absence of a simple, common, but handy and durable material. While this state of things endured, writing would not be used for daily and ordinary purposes, but only in connection with great religious ceremonies or, where culture was materially more advanced, for the preservation of important records or of treasured and sacred knowledge.  It is, therefore, in some circumstance intimately connected with religious ideas and practices that we must look for the explanation we are seeking; and it should be a circumstance common to all these cultures, yet capable of leading to so striking a difference.  The one important circumstance common, one might almost say central, to the ideas and practices of the ancient nations was the reverence for the sun and its supreme importance in religious ceremonies.


Sri Aurobindo: Might not the direction adopted for their writing be determined by some difference in their attitude towards the direction of the sun in its daily movement from east to west?  The difference of attitude can only be explained if we suppose that for some reason the Aryan forefathers had their faces turned southwards, the Mesopotamian northwards and the Mongolian eastwards. In that case, the sun for the Aryans would move from their left to their right, for the Mesopotamians from their right to their left, for the Mongolians straight towards them, and this difference would be represented by the movement of the hand tracing the sacred symbols on some hard ﬂat surface, of stone or other material used for these early scripts.  But what circumstance, again, could lead to this difference?  We can only think of one, — that this tendency might have been formed during the constant migration of these races from their original habitat.


Sri Aurobindo: If we accept Mr. Tilak’s theory of an Aryan migration from the arctic regions southwards towards India, Persia and the Mediterranean countries; if we can suppose that the fathers of the Mesopotamian culture came from the south northwards and that the ﬁrst Mongolian movement was from Central Asia to the east, we shall have the necessary conditions.  We may thus explain also the Sanskrit terms for the four directions; for entering India from the west and following this line in their early colonisation, the east would be in front of the Aryans,, the west behind,, the south on their right,, while the name for the north,, higher, might possibly indicate a memory of their old northern home in that supreme point of the earth where they still placed the sacred mountain of their gods.  Necessarily, this explanation is in the highest degree conjectural and depends on pure intellectual reasoning which is an unsafe guide in the absence of solid and sufﬁcient data. Nevertheless, it is the one positive explanation that suggests itself to us and, as a hypothesis, is well worth taking into consideration.  The ﬁrst three questions are of a curious interest, the last two cover a very wide ﬁeld.


Sri Aurobindo: All except the fourth belong more or less to a kind of knowledge pursued with eager interest by a growing number of inquirers, but still looked on askance by the human mind in general, — the occult sciences. The Hindu Scriptures and books of philosophy do not as a rule handle such questions very directly or in any systematic fashion. They are concerned either with the great and central questions which have always occupied the human mind, the origin and nature of the universe, the why, whence and whither of life, the highest good and the means of attaining it, the nature of man and the destiny of the human soul and its relation with the Supreme, or else they deal with the regulation of ethics, society and the conduct of daily life. Occult knowledge has been left to be acquired by occult teaching. Nevertheless it was possessed by the ancient sages and our correspondent will ﬁnd a great deal of more or less scattered information on these and cognate questions in the Veda, Upanishads and Puranas.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is doubtful whether he would obtain a satisfactory answer to his queries in the form in which he has put them. He will ﬁnd for instance a long description of invisible worlds, — invisible, that is to say, to our physical senses, — in the Vishnu Purana, but it is picturesque rather than precise. We do not think he will ﬁnd much about the constituents of the worlds or the size of subtle bodies.  The form of the third question lends itself to misconception.  Obviously the method for an ordinary man to develop his subtle body into that of a saint, is to cease to be an ordinary man and to become a saint.


Sri Aurobindo: There can be no other means. The subtle body is the mental case and reﬂects the changes of the mentality which is housed in it or the inﬂuence exercised on it by the activities and experiences of our physical existence.  Reincarnation is much more prominent and the ideas about it more systematised in Buddhist than in Hindu books. But most of the Hindu philosophies took some kind of reincarnation for granted. It was part of the ancient teaching which had come down to them from the earliest times.


Sri Aurobindo: They are more concerned with its causes and the method of escape from the obligation of rebirth; the thing itself was for them a fact beyond question.  But the nature of reincarnation is not the same for all the old thinkers. The Upanishads, for instance, seem to teach that the physical self is dissolved at death into its principle, ether; it is the mental being that appears to be born and reborn, but in reality birth and death are merely semblances and operations of Nature, — of Aditi full of the gods,; the spirit is really one in all bodies and is neither born nor dies. Nachiketas in the Katha Upanishad raises the question whether the man as we know and conceive him really survives death and this seems to be the sense of the answer that he receives.


Sri Aurobindo: Is it certain that such people are living in the universal consciousness? or, if they are, is it certain that they are really less humane and compassionate? May they not be exercising their humanity in another fashion than the obvious and external signs of sympathy and tenderness?  If a man is really insensible to the experiences of others in the world, he is not living in the full universal consciousness. Either he has shut himself up in an experience of an individual peace and self-content, or he is absorbed by his contact with some universal principle in its abstract form without regard to its universal action, or he is living inwardly apart from the universe in touch with something transcendent of world-experience.


Sri Aurobindo: All these states are useful to the soul in its progress, but they are not the universal consciousness.  When a man lives in the cosmic self, he necessarily embraces the life of the world and his attitude towards that world struggling upward from the egoistic state must be one of compassion, of love or of helpfulness. The Buddhists held that immersion in the inﬁnite non-ego was in itself an immersion in a sea of inﬁnite compassion. The liberated Sannyasin is described in the Gita and in other Hindu books as one whose occupation is beneﬁcence to all creatures. But this vast spirit of beneﬁcence does not necessarily exercise itself by the outward forms of emotional sympathy or active charity.


Sri Aurobindo: We must not bind down all natures or all states of the divine consciousness in man to the one form of helpfulness which seems to us the most attractive, the most beautiful or the most beneﬁcent. There is a higher sympathy than that of the easily touched emotions, a greater beneﬁcence than that of an obvious utility to particular individuals in their particular sufferings.  The egoistic consciousness passes through many stages in its emotional expansion. At ﬁrst it is bound within itself, callous therefore to the experiences of others. Afterwards it is sympathetic only with those who are identiﬁed in some measure with itself, indifferent to the indifferent, malignant to the hostile.


Sri Aurobindo: When it overcomes this respect for persons, it is ready for the reception of the altruistic principle.  But even charity and altruism are often essentially egoistic in their immediate motive. They are stirred by the discomfort of the sight of suffering to the nervous system or by the pleasurableness of others’ appreciation of our kindliness or by the egoistic self-appreciation of our own benevolence or by the need of indulgence in sympathy. There are philanthropists who would be troubled if the poor were not always with us, for they would then have no ﬁeld for their charity.  We begin to enter into the universal consciousness when, apart from all individual motive and necessity, by the mere fact of unity of our being with all others, their joy becomes our joy, their suffering our suffering.


Sri Aurobindo: But we must not mistake this for the highest condition. After a time we are no longer overcome by any suffering, our own or others’, but are merely touched and respond in helpfulness. And there is yet another state in which the subjection to suffering is impossible to us because we live in the Beatitude, but this does not deter us from love and beneﬁcence, — any more than it is necessary for a mother to weep or be overcome by the little childish griefs and troubles of her children in order to love, understand and soothe.  Nor is detailed sympathy and alleviation of particular sufferings the only help that can be given to men. To cut down branches of a man’s tree of suffering is good, but they grow again; to aid him to remove its roots is a still more divine helpfulness.


Sri Aurobindo: The gift of joy, peace or perfection is a greater giving than the effusion of an individual benevolence and sympathy and it is the most royal outcome of unity with others in the universal consciousness.  “L’I´ N”  In close connection with the intellectual work of synthesis undertaken by this Review a Society has been founded in French India under the name of the New Idea, (L’Id´ee Nouvelle). Its object is to group in a common intellectual life and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and idea it represents and who aspire to realise it in their own individual and social action.  The Society has already made a beginning by grouping together young men of different castes and religions in a common ideal.


Sri Aurobindo: All sectarian and political questions are necessarily foreign to its idea and its activities. It is on a higher plane of thought superior to external differences of race, caste, creed and opinion and in the solidarity of the spirit that unity can be realised.  The Id´ee Nouvelle has two rules only for its members, ﬁrst, to devote some time every day to meditation and self-culture, the second, to use or create daily at least one opportunity of being helpful to others. This is, naturally, only the minimum of initial self-training necessary for those who have yet to cast the whole trend of their thought and feeling into the mould of a higher life and to enlarge the egoistic into a collective consciousness.  The Society has its headquarters at Pondicherry with a reading-room and library.


Sri Aurobindo: A section has been founded at Karikal and others are likely to be opened at Yanaon and Mahe.  A I-F C P  An Indo-French Committee (Comit´e Franco-Hindou) has been  founded in Paris and M. Pierre Loti has been invited to become its Honorary President.


Sri Aurobindo: The Committee proposes to develop intellectual, scientiﬁc, artistic and economic relations between France and India. It is a good deal for one Committee! Let us at least hope that it will be able to carry out the ﬁrst item of its programme. No doubt, everything that brings men and nations nearer to each other helps in the formation of a general intelligence more synthetic and comprehensive than the old divided mind of humanity; but it is above all in the realm of thought and by the exchange of ideas and the deeper experiences that the best fruits are likely to be borne. Every new tie, especially every tie of the spirit between Europe and India, between the West of today and the East of yesterday and tomorrow, is a welcome sign of the times for those who know how much the world’s progress depends on their union.


Sri Aurobindo: M. Pierre Loti, in a letter addressed to the President of the Committee, thus expresses his veneration for India: —  “And now I salute thee with awe, with veneration and wonder, ancient India of whom I am the adept, the India of the highest splendours of Art and Philosophy, the India also of monstrous mysteries that terrify, India our cradle, India where all that has been produced since her beginnings was ever impetuous and colossal. May thy awakening astonish that Occident, decadent, mean, daily dwindling, slayer of nations, slayer of gods, slayer of souls, which yet bows down still, ancient India, before the prodigies of thy primordial conceptions.”  We cannot but subscribe to the sentiment, if not to all the phrases, of this ﬁne piece of literature.  But what are these monstrous and terrifying mysteries of which M. Loti speaks?


Sri Aurobindo: Terror is no longer in the mode, the age of mysteries is over and the age of monstrosities has never been.  Ignorance is the only monstrosity.  M. T’ B G  In an interview with the representative of an Indian journal Mr. Bal Gangadhar Tilak has given a brief account of the work on the Gita which he has been writing during his six years’ internment in Mandalay. He begins: —


Sri Aurobindo: “You know that the Gita is regarded generally as a book inculcating quietistic Vedanta or Bhakti. For myself, I have always regarded it as a work expounding the principles of human conduct from a Vedantic ethical point of view, that is, reconciling the philosophy of active life with the philosophy of knowledge and the philosophy of devotion to God.”  Mr. Tilak then expresses his belief that before Shankara and Ramanuja, the great Southern philosophers, wrote their commentaries, the Gita was understood in its natural sense, but from that time forward artiﬁcial and sectarian interpretations prevailed and the element of Karmayoga in the Song Celestial was disregarded. His book is intended to restore this natural sense and central idea of the famous Scripture. It will contain a word for word rendering preceded by an introduction of some ﬁfteen chapters in which he discusses the Vedanta and the ethics of the Gita and compares the ethical philosophy of Western thinkers with that of the Indian schools of thought.


Sri Aurobindo: Although the book will be published ﬁrst in Marathi, we are promised a version also in English.  We look forward with interest to a work which, proceeding from a scholar of such eminence and so acute an intellect, one especially whose name carries weight with all Hindus, must be considered an event of no small importance in Indian religious thought. We welcome it all the more because it seems to be conceived in the same free and synthetic spirit as animates this Review. It is a fresh sign of the tendency towards an increasingly liberal movement of religious opinion in orthodox India, the dissolution of the old habit of unquestioning deference to great authorities and the consequent rediscovery of the true catholic sense of the ancient Scriptures.  Those who have studied the Gita with a free mind, still more those who have tried to live it, cannot doubt for a moment the justice of Mr. Tilak’s point of view.


Sri Aurobindo: But is not the tendency of the Gita towards a supra-ethical rather than an ethical activity?  Ethics is, usually, the standardising of the highest current social ideals of conduct; the Song Celestial, while recognising their importance, seeks to ﬁx the principle of action deeper in the centre of a man’s soul and points us ultimately to the government of our outward life by the divine self within.  T W  The “Arya”, a Review of pure Philosophy, has no direct concern with political passions and interests and their results. But neither can it ignore the enormous convulsion which is at present in progress, nor at such a time can it affect to deal only with the pettier happenings of the intellectual world as if men were not dying in thousands daily, the existence of great empires threatened and the fate of the world hanging in the balance.


Sri Aurobindo: The War has its aspects, of supreme importance to a synthetic Philosophy, with which we would have the right to deal. But now is not the hour, now in this moment of supreme tension and wide-spread agony. Therefore, for the time, we suppress this heading in our Review and shall replace it by brief notes on subjects of philosophical interest, whether general or of the day.  Meanwhile, with the rest of the world, we await in silence the predestined result.  REOCCUPIED from the earliest times with divine knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme.


Sri Aurobindo: Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human. God the Guru, God the Master, God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these experiences — for to us they are more than merely ideas, — it has carried to its extreme possibilities. But none of them has it pursued, embraced, sung with a more exultant passion of intimate realisation than the yearning for God the Lover, God the Beloved. It would seem as if this passionate human symbol were the natural culminatingpoint for the mounting ﬂame of the soul’s devotion: for it is found wherever that devotion has entered into the most secret shrine of the inner temple. We meet it in Islamic poetry; certain experiences of the Christian mystics repeat the forms and images with which we are familiar in the East, but usually with a certain timorousness foreign to the Eastern temperament.


Sri Aurobindo: For the devotee who has once had this intense experience it is that which admits to the most profound and hidden mystery of the universe; for him the heart has the key of the last secret.  The work of a great Bengali poet has recently reintroduced this idea to the European mind, which has so much lost the memory of its old religious traditions as to welcome and wonder at it as a novel form of mystic self-expression. On the contrary it is ancient enough, like all things natural and eternal in the human soul. In Bengal a whole period of national poetry has been dominated by this single strain and it has inspired a religion and a philosophy. And in the Vaishnavism of the far South, in the songs of the Tamil Alwars we ﬁnd it again in another form, giving a powerful and original turn to the images of our old classic poetry; for there it has been sung out by the rapt heart of a woman to the Heart of the Universe.


Sri Aurobindo: The Tamil word, Alwar, means one who has drowned, lost himself in the sea of the divine being. Among these canonised saints of Southern Vaishnavism ranks Vishnuchitta, Yogin and poet, of Villipattan in the land of the Pandyas. He is termed , the great Alwar. A tradition, which we need not believe, places him in the ninety-eighth year of the Kaliyuga.  But these divine singers are ancient enough, since they precede the great saint and philosopher Ramanuja whose personality and teaching were the last ﬂower of the long-growing Vaishnava tradition.


Sri Aurobindo: Since his time Southern Vaishnavism has been a ﬁxed creed and a system rather than a creator of new spiritual greatnesses.  The poetess Andal was the foster-daughter of Vishnuchitta, found by him, it is said, a new-born child under the sacred tulsi-plant. We know little of Andal except what we can gather from a few legends, some of them richly beautiful and symbolic.  Most of Vishnuchitta’s poems have the infancy and boyhood of Krishna for their subject. Andal, brought up in that atmosphere, cast into the mould of her life what her foster-father had sung in inspired hymns.


Sri Aurobindo: Her own poetry — we may suppose that she passed early into the Light towards which she yearned, for it is small in bulk, — is entirely occupied with her passion for the divine Being. It is said that she went through a symbolic marriage with Sri Ranganatha, Vishnu in his temple at Srirangam, and disappeared into the image of her Lord. This tradition probably conceals some actual fact, for Andal’s marriage with the Lord is still celebrated annually with considerable pomp and ceremony.  ARAN, renowned as Nammalwar (“Our Saint”) among the Vaishnavas and the greatest of their saints and poets, was born in a small town called Kuruhur, in the southernmost region of the Tamil country — Tiru-nelveli (Tinnevelly). His father, Kari, was a petty prince who paid tribute to the Pandyan King of Madura.


Sri Aurobindo: We have no means of ascertaining the date of the Alwar’s birth, as the traditional account is untrustworthy and full of inconsistencies. We are told that the infant was mute for several years after his birth.  Nammalwar renounced the world early in life and spent his time singing and meditating on God under the shade of a tamarind tree by the side of the village temple.  It was under this tree that he was ﬁrst seen by his disciple, the Alwar Madhura-kavi, — for the latter also is numbered among the great Twelve, “lost in the sea of Divine Love”. Tradition says that while Madhura-kavi was wandering in North India as a pilgrim, one night a strange light appeared to him in the sky and travelled towards the South.


Sri Aurobindo: Doubtful at ﬁrst what signiﬁcance this phenomenon might have for him, its repetition during three consecutive nights convinced him that it was a divine summons and where this luminous sign led he must follow. Night after night he journeyed southwards till the guiding light came to Kuruhur and there disappeared. Learning of Nammalwar’s spiritual greatness he thought that it was to him that the light had been leading him. But when he came to him, he found him absorbed in deep meditation with his eyes fast closed and although he waited for hours the Samadhi did not break until he took up a large stone and struck it against the ground violently.  At the noise Nammalwar opened his eyes, but still remained silent.


Sri Aurobindo: Madhura-kavi then put to him the following enigmatical question, “If the little one (the soul) is born into the dead thing (Matter) what will the little one eat and where will the little one lie?” to which Nammalwar replied in an equally enigmatic style, “That will it eat and there will it lie.”  Subsequently Nammalwar permitted his disciple to live with him and it was Madhura-kavi who wrote down his songs as they were composed. Nammalwar died in his thirty-ﬁfth year, but he has achieved so great a reputation that the Vaishnavas account him an incarnation of Vishnu himself, while others are only the mace, discus, conch etc. of the Deity.  From the philosophical and spiritual point of view, his poetry ranks among the highest in Tamil literature. But in point of literary excellence, there is a great inequality; for while some songs touch the level of the loftiest world-poets, others, even though rich in rhythm and expression, fall much below the poet’s capacity.


Sri Aurobindo: In his great work known as the Tiru-vay-moli (the Sacred Utterance) which contains more than a thousand stanzas, he has touched all the phases of the life divine and given expression to all forms of spiritual experience. The pure and passionless Reason, the direct perception in the high solar realm of Truth itself, the ecstatic and sometimes poignant love that leaps into being at the vision of the “Beauty of God’s face”, the ﬁnal Triumph where unity is achieved and “I and my Father are one” — all these are uttered in his simple and ﬂowing lines with a strength that is full of tenderness and truth.  The lines which we translate below are a fair specimen of the great Alwar’s poetry; but it has suffered considerably in the translation, — indeed the genius of the Tamil tongue hardly permits of an effective rendering, so utterly divergent is it from that of the English language.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XIX A  Mind as a ﬁnal action of Supermind is a creative and not only a perceptive power; in fact, material force itself being only a Will in things working darkly as the expression of subconscious Mind, Mind is the immediate creator of the material universe. But the real creator is Supermind; for wherever there is Mind conscious or subconscious, there must be Supermind regulating from behind the veil its activities and educing from them their truth of inevitable result. Not a mental Intelligence, but Supermind is the creator of the universe. — Mind manifests itself in the form of Force to which we give the name of Life, and Life in Matter is an energy or power in dynamic movement which builds up forms, energises, maintains, disintegrates and recreates; death itself is only a process of life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is one all-pervading Life or constant movement of dynamic energy which creates all these forms of the material universe and is not destroyed in the destruction of its forms. — The distinction between animal and plant life is unreal and that between the animate and the inanimate unessential.  Plant-life has been found to be identical in organisation with animal-life and, although the organisation may differ, life is also present in the metal, the earth, the atom. This life-force pervades the universe and is present in every form of it and there is a constant interchange of its energies which creates the symptoms and characteristics of vitality recognised by us; but even where these are suspended, Life is present and only withdraws by a process of dispersion which replaces the process of continual reconstitution of the form. The presence of these symptoms and characteristics is not the essential nor is their absence a sign of the  The Life Divine absence of Life-force.


Sri Aurobindo: Even where we do not detect Life, it exists.  — Conscious nervous sensation accompanies life in the animal, but much of the action of nervous or life energy is subconscious; in the plant, as in many actions of man, the nervous sensation is present but the mentality of the sensation is subconscious.  In the very atom there is a subconscious will and desire which must also be present in all atomic aggregates because they are present in the Force which constitutes the atom. That force is Chit-shakti, force of conscious being, variously represented in various forms of life. — Life is an energising of conscious being in substance of Matter, which on one side is constantly supplying the material of physical formation and on the other labouring to release mind and sense from their subconscious sleep in Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: It is therefore the dynamic link between Mind and Matter. To create form and evolve consciousness out of its imprisonment in form is the sense of the omnipresent Life in the universe.   Chapter XX A  Life is the same whatever its workings and its terms need not be limited to those proper to physical existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Life is a ﬁnal operation of divine conscious-force for individualising existence; it is the energy-aspect of Mind when that creates and relates itself to form of substance: it has all the universal conscious-force of existence behind it and is not a separate entity or movement.  Life in us must become conscious of this divine Force behind it in order to become divine. — Life, at ﬁrst darkened, ignorant, divided and helplessly subject, seeks as it develops to become master and enjoyer, to grow in Power; but until it escapes from the bonds of individuality it must be subject to its three badges of limitation, Death, Desire and Incapacity. — The nature of physical life imposes death because all life exists by a mutual devouring and struggle and Life itself feeds upon the forms it creates; but the fundamental justiﬁcation of Death is the necessity of a constant variation of experience in succession of Time, the soul seeking thus to enlarge itself and move towards the realisation of its own inﬁnity. — The process of Death results inevitably from the division of substance; life’s attempt to aggrandise its being thus divided and limited translates itself into the hunger that devours.


Sri Aurobindo: This hunger is the crude form of Desire, and Desire is the necessary lever for self-afﬁrmation; but eventually Desire has to grow out of the law of Hunger into the law of Love. —  Desire itself is the result of the limitation of capacity which is the consequence of divided Life working as the energy of ignorant mind, all-force being only possible to all-knowledge. Therefore growth by struggle is the third Law of Life. This strife again has to divinise itself and become the clasp of Love.


Sri Aurobindo: Until then Death, Desire and Strife are and must be the triple mask of the divine Life-principle in its cosmic self-afﬁrmation.  Chapter XXI  A   The development of Life starts from an original status of division, subconscious will and inert subjection to mechanical forces.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the type of material existence. — The terms of the second status which we recognise as vitality, are death, hunger and conscious desire, sense of limited capacity and the struggle for survival and mastery. This is the basis of the Darwinian conception of Life, the struggle for life and the survival of the ﬁttest. But this struggle involves a third status whose preparation is marked by the emergence of the conscious principle of love. — The third status contradicts the others in appearance, but really fulﬁls them.


Sri Aurobindo: Life begins with division and aggregation based on the refusal of the atom, the ﬁrst principle of ego and individuality to accept death and fusion by dissolution. This gives a ﬁrm basis for the creation of aggregate forms to be occupied by vital and mental individualities. In the next stage we have the general principle of death and dissolution by which the individual form fuses itself in its elements into other lives. This principle of constant fusion and interchange is the law of Life and extends into vital and mental existence as well as the physical. The two principles of individual persistence and mutual fusion have to be harmonised and this can only be done by the emergence and full development of mind which alone is subtle enough to persist in individual consciousness beyond all fusion and dissolution of forms.


Sri Aurobindo: Here the union and harmony of the persistent individual and the persistent aggregate life become possible. — Love is the power by which this union and harmony are worked out; for love exists by the persistence of the individual and his conscious acceptance of the necessity and desire of interchange and selfgiving. Its growth means the emergence of Mind imposing its law on the material existence, for Mind does not need to devour in order to possess and grow; it increases by giving and conﬁrms itself by fusion with others. — Subconscious will in the atom becomes hunger and conscious desire in the vital being. Love is the transﬁguration of desire, a desire of possessing others but also of self-giving; at ﬁrst subject to hunger and the desire of possession it reveals its own true law by an equal or greater joy in self-giving.


Sri Aurobindo: — The inert subjection of the will in the atom to the not-self becomes in the vital being the sense of limited capacity and the struggle for possession and mastery. In the third status the not-self is recognised as a greater self and subjection to its law and need freely accepted; at the same time the individual by making the aggregate life and all it has to give his own, fulﬁls his impulse of possession . This is the Mind’s reconciliation of the two conﬂicting principles which we ﬁnd at the root of all existence. — But the true and perfect reconciliation can only come by passing beyond Mind and founding all the operations of life on the essential freedom and unity of the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXII  A   Life being a divided movement of consciousness although really an undivided force becomes a clash of opposing truths each striving to fulﬁl itself.


Sri Aurobindo: Mind has to solve the thousand and one problems resulting but in Life itself, not merely in thought. The difﬁculty lies in its ignorance of itself and the world. Man knows only the surface of his own being and does not know the universality of the Force of which he is a part; therefore he can master neither himself nor the world. He has to know and solve the problem or else give place to some higher evolutionary being. — The poise of Life is determined by the relation of the Force to the Consciousness which drives it.


Sri Aurobindo: Accordingly we have, besides the Inﬁnite Existence, ﬁrst the life of material Nature ruled by the infallible Inconscient; secondly the life of conscious being in material Nature emerging out of the Inconscient, fallible, bewildered, only half-potent, which is our own; and thirdly the life of the real Man to which we are moving where Consciousness and Force are fulﬁlled and in harmony and the One at unison with the many. That life will be founded on the awareness of one Consciousness in many minds, one Force working in many lives, one Delight of being in many hearts and bodies. — Man’s difﬁculties; ﬁrst, he only knows and governs a part of himself, the greater part of himself is subconscient and it is this greater cosmic part that really governs his surface being. This is what is meant by his being governed by his Nature and by the Lord seated within through the Maya or apparent denial of Sachchidananda by Himself. It is only by becoming one with the Lord that man can be master of himself, but this union must be in the Divine Maya, in the superconscient and not only or chieﬂy in this lower Maya of the mental existence.


Sri Aurobindo: — Secondly, he is separated by his individuality from the universal and does not know his fellow-beings. He must be not only in sympathy with them, but arrive at a conscious unity with all and this conscious unity exists only in what is now superconscient to us. — Thirdly, Life is at war with body, Mind at war with the life and the body, each trying to subject the others to its own law. Only the supramental can ﬁnd the law of immortal harmony which shall reconcile this discord of our mortality. Each of these principles has besides a soul in it which seeks a self-fulﬁlment beyond what the present force of life, mind or body can give.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a conﬂict between opposing instincts of the body, opposing desires and impulses of the life, opposing ideas of the mind.  The principle of unity is above in the supermind. — Man as he develops becomes acutely aware of all these discords and seeks a reconciliation with himself and with his fellow-beings. This can only come by the perfection of his own existence through the principle in himself to which he has not yet attained and by embracing consciously the life of others in his own through a universal consciousness which must also be gained by the superconscient becoming conscient in us through an upward evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXIII A  The ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter to its luminous consummation in Spirit. Like the other original divine principles, this Delight also must be represented in us by a cosmic principle corresponding to it in the apparent existence. It is the soul or psychic being. — As there is a subliminal luminous mind behind our surface mind, a subliminal life behind our mortal life, a subliminal wider corporeality behind our gross body, so we have a double soul, the superﬁcial desire-soul and the true psychic entity.


Sri Aurobindo: — The superﬁcial in us is the small and egoistic, the subliminal is in touch with the universal. So our subliminal or true psychic being is open to the universal delight of things, the superﬁcial desire-soul is shut off from it. It feels the outward touches of things, not their essence and therefore not their or true touch; and because it cannot reach the universal world-soul, it cannot ﬁnd its own true soul which is one with the world-soul.  — The desire-soul returns the triple response of pleasure, pain and indifference, but the psychic being behind it has the equal delight of all of its experiences; it compels the desire-soul to more and more experience and to a change of its values. By bringing this soul to the surface we can overcome the duality of pleasure and pain, as is actually done in certain directions of experience by the artist, Nature-lover, God-lover, etc. each in his own fashion.


Sri Aurobindo: But the difﬁculty is to do it in the desiresoul at its centre where it comes into contact with practical living; for here the human mind shrinks from the application of the principle of equality. — To bring this subliminal soul to the surface is not enough; for it is open passively to the world-soul but cannot possess the world. Those who thus arrive, become close to the universal delight, but not masters of life. For there are two principles of order and mastery, one false, the ego-sense, the other true, the Lord who is one in the many. By merely suppressing the ego-sense in the impersonal delight we gain the centreless Impersonal and are fulﬁlled in our static being but not in our active being.


Sri Aurobindo: We must therefore gain the other centre in the Supermind by which we shall consciously possess and not merely undergo the delight of the One in His universal existence.   Chapter XXIV A  Life and Mind are in the fact of evolution conditioned by the body and therefore by the principle of Matter. The body is the chief difﬁculty in the way of a spiritual transformation of life; it has therefore been regarded by spiritual aspiration as an enemy and the escape from the material existence has been made an indispensable condition of the ﬁnal emancipation.


Sri Aurobindo: — The quarrel begins with the struggle between Life and Matter with the apparent defeat of life in death as its constant circumstance; it continues with the struggle of the Mind against the life and the body and culminates with the struggle of the spirit against all its instruments; but the right end and solution of these discords is not an escape and a severance but the complete victory of the higher over the lower. — We have to examine the problem of the reality of Matter. Our present experience of Matter does not give us its truth; for Matter is only an appearance of the Reality, a form of its force-action presented to the principle of sense in the universal consciousness. As Mind is only a ﬁnal dividing action of Supermind and Life of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance, so Matter as we know it is only the ﬁnal form taken by conscious-being as the result of that same working. Mind precipitating itself into Life to create form gives to the universal principle of Being the appearance of material substance instead of pure substance, that is to say, of substance offering itself to the contact of mind as a stable thing or object.


Sri Aurobindo: This contact of mind with its object is Sense. —  In the divine Mind there is a movement which presents to the divine Knower the forms of Himself as objects to His knowledge and this would create a division between the Knower and the object of knowledge if there were not at the same time, inevitably, another movement by which He feels the object as Himself. This movement, in the divided state of existence created by dividing Mind, is represented to us as the contact of sense which becomes a basis for contact through the thought-mind by which we return towards unity. — Since the action of Mind is to divide inﬁnitely the one inﬁnite existence, Matter, the result of that action, becomes in its apparent nature an inﬁnite atomic division and atomic aggregation of inﬁnite substance.


Sri Aurobindo: But its reality is one and indivisible, even as is the reality of Life and of Mind. Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight.   Chapter XXV A  Spirit and Matter are the two ends of a unity, Spirit the soul and reality of Matter, Matter the form and body of Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: There is an ascending series of substance and Spirit at the summit is itself pure substance of being. Brahman is the sole material as well as the sole cause of the universe and Matter also is Brahman; it is, like Life, Mind and Supermind, a mode of the eternal Sachchidananda. — Still, practically, Matter seems to be cut off from Spirit and even its opposite and the material existence incompatible therefore with the spiritual. Matter is the culmination of the principle of Ignorance in which Consciousness has lost and forgotten itself and the self-luminous Spirit is represented by a brute inconscient Force in whose mere action there appears to be no self-knowledge, mind or heart. In this huge no-mind Mind emerges and has to labour besieged and limited by the universal Ignorance and in this heartless Inconscience a heart has manifested which has to aspire opposed and corrupted by the brutality of material Force.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the form-absorbed Consciousness returning progressively to itself, but obliged to work under the conditions of Matter, that is to say, always bound and limited in its results. — For Matter is the opposite of the Spirit’s freedom and mastery, the culmination of bondage; it is a huge force of movement, but of inertly driven movement subject to a law of which it has no conscience nor initiative but mechanically obeys. It opposes therefore to the attempt of Life to impose itself and freely utilise and the attempt of Mind to impose itself and know and freely guide the constant opposition of its inertia; it yields reluctantly to a certain extent, but brings always in the end a deﬁnite denial, limit and obstruction. For this reason knowledge, power, love, etc. are always pursued, accompanied and hedged in by their opposites. — For Matter is the culmination of the principle of division and struggle.


Sri Aurobindo: It can only unify by an association which carries with it the possibility of dissociation and an assimilation which devours. Therefore Life and Mind in Matter working under this law of division and struggle, that is to say, of death, desire and limitation, aggregation and subsequent dissociation, labour without any ﬁnality or certainty of assured progress. — But especially the divisions of Matter bring in the law of pain. Ignorance and Inertia would not be necessarily a cause of pain if the Mind and Life were not aware of an inﬁnite Consciousness, Light and Power in which they live but are prevented from participating by the Ignorance and Inertia of Matter or were not stirred to possess this wideness partly or wholly. Man especially, because he is most self-conscious, develops this awareness to a high degree, nor can he be permanently satisﬁed with increase of power or knowledge within the limits of the material world, for that is also limited and inconclusive and, being aware of and impelled by the inﬁnite within and around him, he cannot escape the necessity of seeking to know and possess it.


Sri Aurobindo: This progression of the conscious being out of the Inconscient to the inﬁnite Consciousness might be a happy outﬂowering but for the principle of rigid division and imprisonment of each divided being in his own ego which imposes the law of struggle, the dualities of attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, effort and failure, action and reaction, satisfaction and dissatisfaction. All this is the denial of Ananda and implies, if the negation be insuperable, the futility of existence; for if in this existence the satisfaction sought by the Inﬁnite in the ﬁnite cannot be found, then ultimately it must be abandoned as an error and a failure. — This is the basis of the pessimist theory of material existence which supposes Matter to be the form and Mind the cause of the universe and both of these to be eternally subject to limitation and ignorance. But if on the contrary it is immortal and inﬁnite Spirit which has veiled itself in Matter and is emerging, the development of a liberated supramental being who shall impose in Mind, Life and Matter a higher law than that of limitation and division, is the inevitable conclusion from the nature of cosmic existence. There is no reason why such a  The Life Divine being should not liberate and make divine the physical existence as well as the mind and life, unless our present view of Matter represents the sole possible relation here between sense and its object in which case, indeed, fulﬁlment must be sought only in worlds beyond.


Sri Aurobindo: But there are other states even of Matter and an ascending series of the gradations of substance, and their higher law is possible to the material being because it is there in it already latent and potential.   Chapter XXVI A  The materiality of Matter consists in a concentration of the density of substance and its resistance to the conscious-force of which through sense it becomes the object. An ascending scale of substance from Matter to Spirit must mean a diminution of resistance, division and bondage and an increasing subtlety, ﬂexibility, power of assimilation, interchange, transmutation, uniﬁcation.


Sri Aurobindo: — There is such an ascending scale from the dense to the subtle even in material substance and beyond the subtlest material essence we have grades of other substance corresponding to the series of Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind and Spirit.  Each, that is to say, is the basis of a world or other kind of existence in which these higher principles successively dominate the others and fulﬁl themselves with their aid. In each therefore there is an ever wider range of being, consciousness and force ascending from the inconscience of material substance to the inﬁnite self-consciousness of spiritual. But all these principles are interconnected. Matter contains all of them and evolves them out of itself in obedience to the constant pressure of the higher worlds, an evolution which must continue until they are able to express themselves fully in the material principle.


Sri Aurobindo: — Man is the ﬁt instrument for this fulﬁlment. He has other bodies besides the physical in which he can become conscious and so enter into the supraphysical grades of substance and impose their law upon his material existence. Therefore his complete perfection is through the ascent to supermind and the conquest of the physical also by the supramental substance so that he will be able to command a diviner physical life and conquer death in a divine body.   Chapter XXVII A


Sri Aurobindo: There are, therefore, seven or else eight principles of being and the four which constitute human existence are a refraction of the four which constitute divine existence, but in inverted order. The Divine descends from pure existence to Supermind to cast itself into cosmic existence; the creature ascends from Matter to Mind towards the Divine and meets it where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. By the rending of the veil each of the four divine human principles can ﬁnd its transﬁgured self in its divine equivalent. This transﬁguration is the only possible positive goal of the creative evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: — The presence of the seven principles is essential to all cosmic being. For cosmic being cannot exist except as the All-existence ﬁguring itself in its self-conception as Time and Space, nor can this ﬁguration take place except by an inﬁnite Force which being of the nature of an all-determining and all-apprehending Will must repose on the action of an all-comprehending inﬁnite Consciousness.  Nor could the result be a cosmos but for a power of inﬁnite knowledge and will determining out of the inﬁnity in each ﬁgure of things their law, form and course through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from a boundless liberty within. That power of Knowledge-Will, that Idea is the fourth name of the Divine; it is the Supermind or supreme Gnosis. — The lower trilogy is also necessary in some form however different it may be from our experience of Life, Mind and Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: For there must be a subordinate power and action of Supermind measuring, creating ﬁxed standpoints of mutual view and interaction in the universal self-diffusion as between an inﬁnite number of centres of the one Consciousness; and such a power would be what we mean by Mind. So too, Mind once given, Life, which is the working of will and energy and conscious dynamis of being dependent on such ﬁxed standpoints of interaction, must accompany it and substance with differentiation of form must also be present. — It follows that in every cosmic arrangement the seven principles must be existent, either manifested in simultaneous apparent action or else all apparently involved in one of them which then becomes the initial principle, but all secretly at work and bound to evolve into manifestation. Therefore out of initial Matter latent Life and Mind have emerged as apparent Life and Mind, and latent Supermind and the hidden Spirit must emerge as apparent Supermind and the triune glory of Sachchidananda.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXVIII A  The seven principles of existence are, then, one in their reality, inseparable in their sevenfold action. They create the harmony of the universe and there is no essential reason why this should not be a complete harmony free from the element of discord, division and limitation. — The Vedic seers believed in such a creation and held its formation in man — called immortality — to be the object of man’s Godward effort. But this is difﬁcult for the human mind to accept, except in a beyond, because here the Inconscient seems to be all and the conscient soul an accident or an alien unable fully to realise itself.


Sri Aurobindo: Here Ignorance seems to be the law. — It is true that here we start from the Inconscient and are governed by the Ignorance; we must therefore examine this power of Consciousness and determine its operation and origin, — not accepting the refusal of some philosophies to consider the question because it is insoluble; and ﬁrst we must ﬁx what we mean by the Ignorance. — In the Veda the Ignorance is the non-perceiving of the essential unity which is beyond mind and of the essence and self-law of things in their original unity and actual universality; it is a false knowledge based on division of the undivided, insistence on the fragmentary and little and rejection of the vast and complete view of things; it is the undivine Maya. — The Vedantic distinction of Vidya and Avidya made the opposition more trenchant, Vidya being the knowledge of unity, Avidya the knowledge of multiplicity, but the knowledge of both was held to be necessary for the Truth and the Immortality; the Ignorance was not a mere falsehood and seeing of unreality. The One really becomes the Many.


Sri Aurobindo: — Later, the opposition was supposed to be rigid and irreconcilable, the world unreal, a super-imposition of name and form on featureless Unity by Mind, the Ignorance an absolute nescience of the Truth. — This we reject, because such dialectical oppositions, ﬂawed at their source, represent no actual reality of existence as a whole; there is no irreconcilable opposition of dual principles, Ignorance creative, Knowledge destructive of world-existence, but an essential unity. As pain is an effect of the universal Delight produced in the recipient by incapacity, as incapacity is a disposition of the universal Will-force, so ignorance is a particular action of the universal Knowledge. — Consciousness, which is Power, takes three poises; its plenitude of the divine knowledge invariable in unity and multiplicity and beyond; its dwelling upon apparent oppositions, the extreme being the superﬁcial appearance of complete nescience in the Inconscient; and a mediary term or compromise between the two which is a superﬁcial and partial emergence of self-conscious knowledge, our own egoistic ignorance or false-knowledge. The exact relations between these three have to be determined.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXIX  A Memory is believed by some schools to be the constituent of our continuous personality; but memory is only a mechanism, a device, a substitute for direct consciousness. The mind is directly conscious of existence in the present, holds existence in the past by its substitute memory, infers its future existence from this direct present self-consciousness and the memory of its continuity in the past. —


Sri Aurobindo: This sense of self-conscious existence it extends into the idea of eternity, but the only eternity the mind really seizes is a continuous succession of moments of being in eternal Time; of this eternity it possesses only the present moment, a limited portion of the past held fragmentarily and nothing at all of the future, while it is unable to know any timeless eternity of conscious being, any real eternal Self. Therefore the nature of our Mind is an Ignorance seizing at knowledge by successive action in the moments of Time. — If mind is all, then we must remain for ever in this Ignorance which is not absolute nescience, but an ineffectual and fragmentary seizing at knowledge. But there are really two powers of our conscious being, Ignorance of the mind, Knowledge beyond mind, simultaneously existing, either separately in an eternal dualism or, as is really the fact, as superior and inferior, sovereign and dependent states of the same consciousness, by which the Knower sees his timeless being and the action of Time in that self through the Knowledge while he sees himself in Time and travelling in the succession of its moments by the Ignorance. For this reason the Upanishad declares that Brahman can really be known only by knowing him as both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and so only can one arrive at the status of immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: — Ignorance is therefore the consciousness of being in the succession of Time, and it is so called because, actually self-divided by the moments of Time, the ﬁeld of space and the forms of the multiplicity, it cannot know either eternal Being or the World, either the transcendent or the universal reality. Its knowledge is partly true, partly false, because it ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon. — It is through self-consciousness that the mind can arrive most readily at the eternal Reality; the rest of its means of knowledge are, like memory, devices and substitutes for direct consciousness. It is easy therefore to regard the knowledge of the self within as real and the rest as not-self and illusion. But the distinction is illusory and self-absorption in the stable self within is only one state of consciousness like self-dispersion in thought and memory and will.


Sri Aurobindo: The real self is the Eternal who is capable simultaneously of the mobility in Time and the immobility basing Time. All object of knowledge is that real and eternal self whether seen in essence and stability or in phenomenon and instability of Time. — The Ignorance is a means by which it is rendered into values of knowledge and action, Time being a sort of bank on which we draw for valuation and action in the present, with a realised store in the account of the past and an unrealised inﬁnite deposit to be taken from the future so as to be made valuable for Time-experience and valid for Time-activity.  But, behind, all is known and ready for use according to the will of the Self in its dealings with Time and Space and Causality.  Chapter XXX


Sri Aurobindo: A Consciousness of Self has two different aspects, the awareness of a stable, immutable and timeless Self beyond mentality and the awareness of a various self-experience in the process of Time and the ﬁeld of Space. There is a constant shifting of the point of Time, a constant though less obvious changing of the habitation and the environment and in these a constant subjective modifying of the experience of the states of personality and the experience of the environment. — Memory here is an indispensable factor in the linking of past and present experience and is necessary to secure its continuity and coherence. Still Memory is not all; it is only a mediator between the mind-sense and the coordinating mind. — It is the mindsense which shapes the object of experience as a wave of the conscious being into a movement of emotion, vitality, sensation or thought-perception.


Sri Aurobindo: There is also an act of mental observation and valuation of this wave in the sense-mind. There is also the subject or mental being who thus modiﬁes his mental becoming and observes and values it by an act of mind. It is when the mental being stands back from the mental becoming and even from the mental act that he begins to perceive himself as something different from all becoming, mutable in that, but immutable beyond it. He is not two selves, one that is and one that becomes, but one immutable who sees changing phenomena of his being, the immutability evident to a direct and pure self-consciousness, the mutable evident indirectly through a conditional and secondary mental consciousness. — It is the character of this indirect mental consciousness which can experience only by succession of Time that brings in the device of Memory.


Sri Aurobindo: Memory is not the essence of mental experience of becoming, nor of its continuity, nor of the recurrence of the same experience or the same cause and effect in Time. These are circumstances of the movement of the stuff of conscious being and conscious force of being, a movement which is really undivided though only seen by mind in artiﬁcial divisions.  Memory is a device by which the experiences of the mind-sense are linked together and these artiﬁcial divisions in Time bridged over so that the coordinating mind and will may better and better use the material of experience and impose order on its conscious knowledge of its self and its conscious action in its environment. It is an aid to our ignorance of self developing, in the evolution of mind out of inconscient force, knowledge of self by experience. — The ego-sense is a mental device by which the mental being develops towards knowledge of that which experiences as well as of that which is experienced.


Sri Aurobindo: Memory only tells us that the successive experiences have happened in the same ﬁeld of conscious being; it is the coordinating and distinguishing mind which tells us that it is the same mental being who experiences. — Mind-substance suffers the changes of becoming; mind-sense experiences them; memory assures the mind-sense of its continuity of experience; the coordinating mind of knowledge relates them together and relates them also to the ego or being who, it says, is the same in past and present whether he forgets or remembers. In the animal this may be little more than a coordination in the sense-mind by a discernment largely involved in the sensations and the memories, but in man it becomes a coordinating reason superior to sense and memory.  It is by this development that the ego-sense becomes distinct and disengaged from its aids. — But it is itself only a device and basis for self-development of true self-knowledge; it is a stage in the evolution from nescience to partial knowledge and from partial knowledge to true self-consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The evolving Mind becomes by it aware of an “I” that becomes and then of a self superior to the becoming. It may ﬁx on either to the rejection of the other, but in doing so it acts on an imperfect self-knowledge. It is as yet ignorant of all even of the individual  The Life Divine becoming which is not superﬁcial; ignorant of the universal becoming except indirectly, as a not-self exterior to it. Its attempt to ﬁnd the true relation of the self and its becomings is based therefore on an Ignorance; that can only be truly known by an attempt to live out the relation in an integral development of self-knowledge. That is the natural goal of our evolution which is the movement of the Ignorance to exceed itself and arrive at the conscious Truth of its being and conscious knowledge of all being.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXXI A  We know only a part even of our superﬁcial life and conscious becoming, fastening only on a little of our experience of self and things, memorising less, using still less for knowledge and action.  What we reject, Nature stores and uses in our development, for the most part by her subconscious action. Our waking self is only a superimposition, a visible summit; the great body of our being is submerged or subliminal.


Sri Aurobindo: — The subliminal self perceives, remembers, understands, uses all that we fail to perceive, remember or use. It provides all the material of our surface being which is only a selection from its wider existence and activity.  It is only the physical and vital part of our existence which is, properly speaking, subconscient; the subliminal self is the true mental being and in relation to our waking mind it is rather secretly circumconscient; for it envelops as well as supports.  Of all this larger part of our being we are ignorant. — We are ignorant also of the superconscient, that which we ordinarily call spirit or oversoul; yet this we ﬁnd to be our highest and widest self, Sachchidananda creating and governing all that we are and become by His divine Maya.


Sri Aurobindo: We are ignorant of the subliminal sea of our being which casts up the wave of our superﬁcial existence; we are ignorant also of the superconscient ether of our being which constitutes, contains, overroofs and governs both the subliminal sea and the superﬁcial wave. — We are ignorant of ourselves in Time, for we know only a part of the present life we are living; yet that exists only by all our past of which we are ignorant and its trend is determined by all our future of which we are still more ignorant. For our superconscient Self is eternal  The Life Divine in its being and Time is only one of its modes, our subliminal is eternal in its becoming and Time is its inﬁnite ﬁeld of experience.  — We are equally ignorant of the world, holding it to be not-self, ignorant of ourselves in Space; for the world is one Self developing the movement of its conscious force in its self-conceptive extension as Space. We conﬁne ourselves in our consciousness to a single knot of the one indivisible Matter, a single eddy of the one indivisible Life, a single station of the one indivisible Mind, a single soul-manifestation of the one indivisible Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Yet it is only by knowing the One that this individual mind, life, body, soul can know itself or its action. — Thus ignorance of self is the nature of our mind, but an ignorance full of the impulse towards self-possession and self-knowledge. A manysided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the deﬁnition of man the mental being.   Chapter XXXII


Sri Aurobindo: A   The ignorance in which we live is a sevenfold self-ignorance; an ignorance of the Absolute and knowledge only of the relations of being and becoming; an ignorance of our timeless and immutable self-existence and knowledge only of the cosmic becoming; an ignorance of our cosmic self and knowledge only of our egoistic existence; an ignorance of our eternal becoming in Time and knowledge only of the one life present to our memory; an ignorance of our larger and complex being in the world and knowledge only of our surface waking existence; an ignorance of the higher principles of our existence and knowledge only of the life, mind and body; an ignorance therefore of the right law and enjoyment of living and a knowledge only of the confused strife of the dualities. — Our conception of the Ignorance determines our conception of the knowledge and by that of the aim of our existence, which coincides with the ideal of the earlier Vedic thought.


Sri Aurobindo: — We conﬁrm by it our rejection of the extreme views which hold the absolute Non-existence or absolute Existence to be alone true and the relative world of being and becoming an ignorance to be renounced. There is the unmanifest Absolute and there is its manifestation; to fulﬁl the manifestation and live in the sense of it as the Absolute manifesting himself is the Knowledge. — We reject the view that regards the One, Inﬁnite, Formless, Spirit, Superconscient as the sole truth and the opposite terms as unreal or eventually false and vain values to be abandoned. We accept it and them also not as alternates, but as simultaneous values of the manifestation and their union in our consciousness and right use of their relations as the knowledge.   The Life Divine


Sri Aurobindo: — We reject equally the views that afﬁrm a pluralistic Becoming without Being or see Mind, Life or Matter as the original principle, and we reject the limitation to our apparent Nature which is their practical conclusion. Becoming as the working out of the energies of Being, Mind, Life and Matter as inferior terms of the higher divine Nature to be illumined, uplifted, transformed by the higher terms is our view of the knowledge.  — We reject also intermediate theories like that which makes God and cosmos one, — perceiving as we do that cosmos exists in God who exceeds it and not God by the cosmos, — or like that which seeks to abandon the earth and ﬁnd fulﬁlment only in heavens where the Many enjoy the presence of the One, — perceiving, as we do, that there is a higher knowledge which leads to complete identity and that divine life based upon it need not be conﬁned to heavens beyond, but may embrace the earth also. — Ignorance is an initial state of knowledge, the essence of which is to create a sense of limitation and division; it is this which we have to overcome and transcend without creating an opposite self-limitation.


Sri Aurobindo: The integral aim of our existence can only be the possession and power and joy of our integral self-knowledge.   Chapter XXXIII A  To rise out of the sevenfold Ignorance into the integral Knowledge is the progress of man’s being; it is to grow in all his complex existence and consciousness into the full possession and enjoyment of his whole and his true being. — He starts with three categories, himself, Nature or cosmos and God, and though he tries to deny any two of these in order to afﬁrm the third only, he cannot really succeed; for he is neither separate nor sufﬁcient to himself, cosmos also is not sufﬁcient to itself, but points always to an inﬁnite, one and absolute behind it, and to afﬁrm the Absolute to the exclusion of these two others leaves man unsatisﬁed and cosmos unexplained.


Sri Aurobindo: — In afﬁrming himself man has ﬁrst to put himself in front and act and feel as if God and the world existed for him and were less important to him than himself; this is his egoistic phase necessary to disengage his individuality out of Nature and as if against her and to bring it out into force and capacity. He has to afﬁrm himself in the Ignorance before he can perfect himself in the Knowledge.  Afterwards he has to seek for himself in Nature and God and others, but it is still himself that he seeks to know and possess and his own perfection or salvation which is his motive. — In the progressive enlargement of his knowledge he gets rid of his sevenfold ignorance; of the temporal by growing into his eternal being with its pre-existence and subsequent existence in Time; of the psychological by enlarging his self-knowing beyond the waking self into the subconscient and superconscient; of the constitutional by realising his spiritual being and its categories; of the cosmic by discovering his timeless self; of the egoistic by  The Life Divine realising the cosmic consciousness; of the original by opening to the Absolute of whom Self, individual and Nature are so many faces. — At the same time he realises the unity of himself and Nature in the ﬁrst three steps of knowledge, of himself and God in the others; of himself with all beings relatively in Nature and absolutely in God; of God and Nature because it is the Self who has become all these beings and the nature of the Lord which is apparent in cosmos.


Sri Aurobindo: — The knowledge of Nature leads him to the same results as soon as he goes beyond Matter and Life to Mind; for he discovers a subconscient and superconscient, a soul in Matter, and perceives a supernature in which he realises the Self, the Spirit, the Absolute. — In the quest of God he begins by seeing him through Nature and himself, crudely and obscurely at ﬁrst, till he ﬁnds more luminously the one Truth behind all religions; for all seize on the Divine in many aspects and their variety is necessary in order that man should come to know God entirely. — When he arrives at the unity of his knowledge of God, man and Nature, he has the complete knowledge, the sense and goal of humanity’s progress and labour and the sure foundation of all perfections and all harmonies.  APPENDIX I Chapter I A B A search for God, (for a spiritual or divine Reality within oneself and behind, above or within the phenomenon of existence,) for perfection, for freedom, for an absolute Truth and Bliss, for immortality has been the persistent preoccupation of the highest human thought since the earliest times. This preoccupation seems to be a perpetual element in man’s nature; for it survives the longest periods of scepticism.


Sri Aurobindo: This aspiration is in contradiction with his present existence and normal experience of himself which is that of a mortal being full of imperfections, ego-ridden, largely animal, subject to transitory joys and much pain and suffering, bound by mechanical necessity. But the direct contradiction between what he is and what he seeks to be need not be a ﬁnal argument against the validity of his aspiration. For such contradictions are part of Nature’s general method; the aspiration may be realisable either by a revolutionary individual effort or by an evolutionary general progress.  The problems of existence are problems of harmony. Discords and disorder of the materials, oppositions, demand a solution by accordance, by the discovery of a harmony.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus the accordance of an inanimation and inertia in a containing Matter and the active indwelling stress of Life is Nature’s ﬁrst problem, its initial difﬁculty; its perfect solution would be immortality in a material body. The accordance of an unconscious Matter and  The Life Divine an unconscious or half-conscious Life with a conscious Mind and Will is her second problem; the possession of a direct and perfect instrumentation of knowledge in a living body would be its complete solution. The accordance of a mortal mind, life and body with a secretly indwelling immortal spirit is the ﬁnal problem; the spiritualisation or divinisation of mind, life and body, a divine life, would be the perfect solution. The search after these solutions by the human being is not irrational; it is rather the very effort and striving of Nature within him.  Life appears in Matter, Mind in Life because they are already there.


Sri Aurobindo: Matter is a form of veiled Life; Life a form of veiled Mind; Mind may well be a form and veil of a higher power, the Spirit, which is supramental in its nature. Nature has implanted an impulse towards life in certain forms of Matter and evolves it there, a similar evolutionary impulse towards mind in certain forms of life, an impulse in certain minds towards what is beyond Mind, towards the unveiling of Spirit, the evolution of a spiritual being. Each impulse justiﬁes itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties.  There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organisation or status of existence as ﬁnal. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.


Sri Aurobindo: S S C  Man’s highest aspiration has been always a seeking for God, perfection, freedom, an absolute truth and bliss, immortality.  A direct contradiction exists between this aspiration and his present state of mortality, imperfection, bondage to mechanical necessity, ego and animality.  This contradiction between what he is now and what he seeks to be is not a ﬁnal argument against his aspiration. Contradictions are part of Nature’s method; the aspiration may be achievable by individual effort or by an evolutionary progress.


Sri Aurobindo: The problems of existence are problems of harmony.  The accordance of an active life-principle with the inanimate Matter containing it is Nature’s ﬁrst evolutionary problem; its complete solution would be immortality in the body.  The accordance of conscious mind with an unconscious matter and half-conscious life is her second evolutionary problem; a direct and perfect instrumentation of knowledge in a living body would be its complete solution.  The accordance of immortal spirit with a mortal mind, life and body is her third and ﬁnal problem; its complete solution would be the evolution of a divine being and a divine nature.  As Nature has implanted the impulse to life in matter, to mind in life, so she has implanted in mind the impulse towards the evolution of what is beyond mind, spiritual, supramental.


Sri Aurobindo: Each impulse justiﬁes itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties.  The animal is a laboratory in which she has worked out man; man may be a laboratory in which she wills to work out the superman, the being of a divine nature.  APPENDIX II Chapter XXIV  Life then is not an inexplicable dream or impossible evil; it is a force of being, a pulsation of the divine All-existence capable of divine outﬂowering. But there still remains the problem of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: This problem is of a fundamental importance. For all here, mind, life, body, depend on Matter, evolve out of it; Matter is their support, conditions their emergence and action. Man rose out of the animal by developing a body capable of a progressive mental illumination; to rise beyond himself to a divine manhood or supermanhood he must develop a physical instrumentation or body capable of a still greater supramental illumination.  But the body seems to be from the beginning the soul’s great obstacle. Its opposition is a compelling cause of asceticism and of the condemnation put by most religions upon Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: The conﬂict begins with Life and increases as higher principles evolve. There is a discord between Life and Matter ending in death, the defeat of Life; but really there is a constant compromise, Life using Matter and even death for its own continuance:  Mind struggles with the limitations of life and matter, and there is a half victory, a constant compromise. When spirit wakens to itself it ﬁnds itself hampered by mind, life and body, oppressed by its instruments. The solution proposed is to carry this discord to its logical conclusion.


Sri Aurobindo: Life rejects body, mind rejects life, the spirit abandons its instruments and departs from world into its own inﬁnity.  This solution is not a solution, it is only the individual’s escape from the problem; the labour of the world and its discord continues. But if Sachchidananda is the world’s indwelling reality, discord cannot be the fundamental principle. The real solution must be a true and complete conquest and taking up of body by life, of life by mind, of all three by the spirit.  This can seem possible only when we have found the real truth of Matter as of Soul, Mind and Life.


Sri Aurobindo: As Life is found to be force of Spirit, and Mind to be consciousness of Spirit, so Matter is found to be body and substance of Spirit.  Matter as a thing in itself is non-existent. What we see of it is a form or forms created by a particular relation between our sense-experience and the all-existence in which we move. Science discovers that Matter resolves into forms of Energy; Philosophy discovers that Matter is only a substantial appearance and the one reality is Spirit. But what brings about this phenomenon of forms of Energy or this appearance of Spirit?


Sri Aurobindo: There should be only states of spirit or currents of Energy; whence these phenomena of forms? It can be attributed to an action of consciousness, an i


Sri Aurobindo: ntervention of Mind, — sense-mind creates the forms it seems to perceive; Thought works upon them and gives them their values. But the embodied individual thought or sense which thus conceives or perceives is itself a creation and cannot be the creator. There must be a universal Mind not known to us because subconscious to us in the form of the universe, superconscious to us in the spirit. Such a universal Mind may have determined and constructed the relations of form with form and the rhythms of the universe.  But how is this done?


Sri Aurobindo: Existence in its activity is a Consciousness-Force which presents the workings of its Force to its consciousness as forms of being. The Force of Existence of the one sole conscious being can by its workings produce no results that are not forms of that Being. Matter as substance of forms must then be itself a form or substance of spirit; it can be nothing else.  The appearances it assumes, the phenomena of Matter are the result of the dividing action of Mind. Consciousness  The Life Divine descending from Supermind appears as Mind, an inferior power of Supermind, Force appears as Life, an energy instrumental to Mind; Mind descending into Life becomes by involution in it subconscient and gives to the material workings of Life the appearance of inconscience.


Sri Aurobindo: The inconscience, inertia, atomic disaggregation of Matter is due to this involved action of Mind.  The creative life-energy of Mind involved in Matter and there turned into what appears to us as an inconscient material Energy gives to form or substance of being on which it works the aspect of inconscience. Mind here is a ﬁrst action of Supermind in the involutionary descent working in these conditions, separated from the Supermind, Life is a similar action of Force of Being, Matter the form taken by Being itself as a result of this working.  The fragmentation of Matter is due to the dividing action of Mind which does not abrogate the essential unity of Existence.  The object is to push the principle of Multiplicity in the One to its extreme which can only be done by division and separativeness of consciousness and of form.


Sri Aurobindo: For an awareness of things from separate centres of consciousness is meant to be the basic experience of existence here. The movement of Mind the dividing principle makes the knower regard the forms of his own universal being as other than he, but it has also a movement of union which heals this phenomenal division. In divine Mind the two actions are simultaneous and prevent the division from being real. In ignorant or involved Mind the division seems real; the movement towards union becomes a contact of consciousness and primarily a contact of sense. Material substance is the form in which Mind acting through sense contacts being as object, — as a general object, a mass of objective existence and a multitude of objects in that mass of being.


Sri Aurobindo: HE “STANDARD BEARER” comes into the ﬁeld today entrusted with a special mission and as the bearer of an ideal and a message. The standard it carries is not that of an outward battle, but the ensign of a spiritual ideal and of a life that must be its expression and the growing body of its reality.  Our endeavour shall be to prepare the paths and to accomplish the beginning of a great and high change which we believe to be and aim at making the future of the race and the future of India.  Our ideal is a new birth of humanity into the spirit; our life must be a spiritually inspired effort to create a body of action for that great new birth and creation.  A spiritual ideal has always been the characteristic idea and aspiration of India.


Sri Aurobindo: But the progress of Time and the need of humanity demand a new orientation and another form of that ideal. The old forms and methods are no longer sufﬁcient for the purpose of the Time-Spirit. India can no longer fulﬁl herself on lines that are too narrow for the great steps she has to take in the future. Nor is ours the spirituality of a life that is aged and world-weary and burdened with the sense of the illusion and miserable inutility of all God’s mighty creation. Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: It is to accept the world as an effort of manifestation of the Divine, but also to transform humanity by a greater effort of manifestation than has yet been accomplished, one in which the veil between man and God shall be removed, the divine manhood of which we are capable shall come to birth and our life shall be remoulded in the truth and light and power of the spirit. It is to make of all our action a sacriﬁce to the master of our action and an expression of the greater self in man and of all life a Yoga.  The West has made the growth of the intellectual, emotional,  Standard Bearer vital and material being of man its ideal, but it has left aside the greater possibilities of his spiritual existence. Its highest standards are ideals of progress, of liberty, equality and fraternity, of reason and science, of efﬁciency of all kinds, of a better political, social and economical state, of the unity and earthly happiness of the race. These are great endeavours, but experiment after experiment has shown that they cannot be realised in their truth by the power of the idea and the sentiment alone: their real truth and practice can only be founded in the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: The West has put its faith in its science and machinery and it is being destroyed by its science and crushed under its mechanical burden. It has not understood that a spiritual change is necessary for the accomplishment of its ideals. The East has the secret of that spiritual change, but it has too long turned its eyes away from the earth.  The time has now come to heal the division and to unite life and the spirit.  This secret too has been possessed but not sufﬁciently practised by India.


Sri Aurobindo: It is summarised in the rule of the Gita, . Its principle is to do all actions in Yoga, in union with God, on the foundation of the highest self and through the rule of all our members by the power of the spirit. And this we believe to be not only possible for man but the true solution of all his problems and difﬁculties. This then is the message we shall constantly utter and this the ideal that we shall put before the young and rising India, a spiritual life that shall take up all human activities and avail to transﬁgure the world for the great age that is coming. India, she that has carried in herself from of old the secret, can alone lead the way in this great transformation of which the present of the old is the forerunner.