Sri Aurobindo: One, but multitudinously one, it presents itself in a million aspects. To some it appears as a great permanent Negative or a magniﬁcent, a happy annihilation of all that we know as an existence. To others it is a featureless Absolute; the annihilation of personality and world-Nature is its key and silence and an ineffable peace its gate of our entrance. To others it is a Supreme, positive beyond all positives, an Existence, an absolute Consciousness, an illimitable Beatitude. To others it is the one Divine beyond all Divinities, an ineffable Person of whom all these three supreme things are the attributes.


Sri Aurobindo: And so through an endless chapter. As is the power of our spirit and the cast of our nature, so we conceive of the one Eternal and Inﬁnite.  This Eternal and Inﬁnite, however we conceive it, is the one ultimate aim of Yoga. Other smaller aims there are that can be achieved by it and are pursued by many seekers; but these are crowns of the wayside or even ﬂowers of the bye-paths and their pursuit for their own sake may lead us far aside or far away from our eternal home.  The object of supramental Yoga combines all the others, but uplifts and transforms the smaller aims into a part of the completeness of the one supreme object.


Sri Aurobindo: Not to lose oneself altogether in some ineffable featurelessness is its object, but to renounce ego for our true divine person one with the universal and inﬁnite; not to abolish consciousness, but to exchange ignorance for a supreme and all-containing Knowledge, not to blot out joy but to renounce human pleasure for a divine grieﬂess beatitude, not to give up but to transform all world-nature and world-existence into a power of the Truth of the Divine Existence. Asceticism is not the ﬁnal condition or characteristic means of this Yoga, although it does not exclude, whenever that is needful ascetic self-mastery or ascetic endeavour.  To become one in our absolute being with the ineffable Divine and in the manifestation a free movement of his being, power, consciousness and self-realising joy, to grow into a divine Truthconsciousness beyond mind, into a Light beyond all human or earthly lights, into a Power to which the greatest strengths of men are a weakness, into the wisdom of an infallible gnosis and the mastery of an unerring and unfailing divinity of Will, into a Bliss beside which all human pleasure is as the broken reﬂection of a candle-ﬂame to the all-pervading splendour of an imperishable sun, but all this not for our own sake [but] for the pleasure of the Divine Beloved, this is the goal and the crown of the supramental path of Yoga.   This change is a thing in Nature and not out of Nature; it is not only possible, but for the growing soul inevitable.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the goal to which Nature in us walks through all this appearance of ignorance, error, suffering and weakness.  159  The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent of the soul towards God and a descent of the Godhead into the embodied nature.  The ascent demands a one-centred all-gathering aspiration of soul and mind and life and body upward, the descent a call of the whole being towards the inﬁnite and eternal Divine. If this call and this aspiration are there and if they grow constantly and seize all the nature, then and then only its supramental transformation becomes possible.


Sri Aurobindo: There must be an opening and surrender of the whole nature to receive and enter into a greater divine consciousness which is there already above, behind and englobing this mortal halfconscious existence. There must be too an increasing capacity to bear an ever stronger and more insistent action of the divine Force, till the soul has become a child in the hands of the inﬁnite Mother. All other means known to other Yoga can be used and are from time to time used as subordinate processes in this Yoga too, but they are impotent without these greater conditions, and, once these are there, they are not indispensable.  In the end it will be found that this Yoga cannot be carried through to its end by any effort of mind, life and body, any human psychological or physical process but only by the action of the supreme Shakti. But her way is at once too mysteriously direct and outwardly intricate, too great, too complete and subtle to be comprehensively followed, much more to be cut out and deﬁned into a formula by our human intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man, but he can call down the divine Truth and its power to work in him. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle. Self-surrender to a supreme transmuting Power is the key-word of the Yoga.  This divinisation of the nature of which we speak is a metamorphosis, not a mere growth into some kind of superhumanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God-nature. The mental or vital demigod, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha, — Titan, vital giant and demon, — are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind power or life power only, but they do not live in the supreme Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Only those who live in a supreme Truth consciousness and embody it are inwardly made or else remade in the Divine image.  The aim of supramental Yoga is to change into this supreme Truth-consciousness, but this truth is something beyond mind and this consciousness is far above the highest mind-consciousness. For truth of mind is always relative, uncertain and partial, but this greater Truth is peremptory and whole. Truth of mind is a representation, always an inadequate, most often a misleading representation, and even when most accurate, only a reﬂection, Truth’s shadow and not its body. Mind does not live in the Truth or possess but only seeks after it and grasps at best some threads from its robe; the supermind lives in Truth and [is] its native substance, form and expression; it has not to seek after it, but possesses it always automatically and is what it possesses.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the very heart of the difference.  The change that is effected by the transition from mind to supermind is not only a revolution in knowledge or in our power for knowledge. If it is [to] be complete and stable, it must be a divine transmutation of our will too, our emotions, our sensations, all our power of life and its forces, in the end even of the very substance and functioning of our body. Then only can it be said that the supermind is there upon earth, rooted in its very earth-substance and embodied in a new race of divinised creatures.  Supermind at its highest reach is the divine Gnosis, the Wisdom-Power-Light-Bliss of God by which the Divine knows and upholds and governs and enjoys the universe[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 160  The supramental Yoga is a path of integral seeking of the Divine by which all that we are is in the end liberated out of the Ignorance and its undivine formations into a truth beyond the Mind, a truth not only of highest spiritual status but of a dynamic spiritual self-manifestation in the universe.  The object of this Yoga is not to liberate the soul from Nature, but to liberate both soul and nature by sublimation into the Divine Consciousness from whom they came.  The aim of the ordinary Yoga is to liberate the soul from Nature or, perhaps sometimes, to liberate the soul in Nature.  Our aim is to liberate both soul and nature into the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Our aim is to pass from the Ignorance into the Divine Light, from death into Immortality, from Desire into self-existent Bliss, from limited human-animal consciousness into all-consciousness and God-consciousness, from the ignorant seeking of Mind into the self-existent knowledge of Supermind, from obscure half animal life into luminous God-force, from the material consciousness  [ ]   161


Sri Aurobindo: It is at the high line where the surrender can become absolute that a divine gnostic consciousness commences and the ﬁrst authentic and unconditioned workings of the supramental Nature.  162  The ﬁrst word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender. It is by a will to give oneself to the eternal Divine, for lifting into the divine consciousness, for perfection, for transformation, that the Yoga begins; it is in the entire giving that it culminates; for it is only when the self-giving is complete that there comes the ﬁnality of the Yoga, the entire taking up into the supramental Divine, the perfection of the being, the transformation of the nature.  163


Sri Aurobindo: This is a Yoga of transformation of the being, not solely a Yoga of the attainment of the inner Self or the Divine, though that attainment is its basis without which no transformation is possible. In this transformation there are four elements, the psychic opening, the transit through [the] occult, the spiritual release, the supramental perfection. If any of the four is unachieved, the Yoga remains incomplete.  I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul nature. This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness and much misprision of the true nature of this soul and it is given a wide extension of meaning which carries it far beyond that province.


Sri Aurobindo: All phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal psychological or an occult character are dubbed psychic; if a man has a double personality changing from one to another, if an apparition of a dying man, something of his mere vital sheath or else a thought-form of him, appears and stalks through the room of his wondering friend, if a poltergeist kicks up an unseemly row in a house, all that is classed under psychic phenomena and regarded as a ﬁt object for psychic research, though these things have nothing whatever to do with the psyche. Again much in Yoga itself that is merely occult, phenomena of the unseen vital or mental or subtle physical planes, visions, symbols, all that mixed, often perturbed, often shadowy, often illusory range of experiences which belong to this intervening country between the soul and its superﬁcial instruments or rather to its outermost fringes, all the chaos of the intermediate zone, is summed up as psychic and considered as an inferior and dubious province of spiritual discovery. Again there is a constant confusion between the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his life-force seeking for its fulﬁlment and the true soul which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine.  Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and experience it is itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or some subtle substratum of mind and life. But in Yoga if we accept all this chaotic mass as soul-stuff or soul-movement we shall enter into a confusion without an issue.


Sri Aurobindo: All that belongs only to the coverings of the soul; the soul itself is an inner divinity greater than mind or life or body. It is something that once it is released from obscuration by its instruments at once creates a direct contact with the Divine and with the self and spirit.   164  In the integral Yoga there is a progressive discovery of our spiritual status; this progression is accompanied by a dynamic new-creation of our nature.


Sri Aurobindo: A triple transformation is its process and the revelation of its entire signiﬁcance.  A ﬁrst discovery is the unveiling of the soul out of its disguising mask, concealing curtain, blockading wall of mind, life and body — the psychic entity, the divine element in our nature which gives it its permanence and immortality, becomes the open ruler of our instruments and transmutes them into conscious spiritualised agents so that they are no longer a changing formulation of the nature of the Ignorance.  165  Yoga is not only a discovery of our concealed spiritual status but a dynamic spiritual self-creation; a triple transformation is the heart of its process and the revelation of its entire signiﬁcance.  Its ﬁrst step is the unveiling of the soul; for there [is a] secret psychic being, a divine element in our depths that is concealed even more than garbed by the mind, body and life.


Sri Aurobindo: To bring it out of its seclusion where it lives like a spiritual king without apparent power served and replaced by its ministers, so that it may take over the whole active government of the nature is the ﬁrst great unfolding, the initial potent self-discovery of the Yoga. Mind the thinker is the prime minister in us who covers the king, but mind too is dominated and led by the vital powers, the strong and violent of the realm, who force it to serve their purpose and these too can only act with the means given them by the body and physical nature, the inert hardly conscious subject existence whose passive assent and docile instrumentation is yet indispensable to its rulers. This is our present constitution and it amounts to no more than a sort of organised confusion, a feudal order that is an ignorant half anarchy and cannot make the most of the possibilities and resources even of the limited tract of nature which we inhabit, much less reveal to us and exploit our spiritual empire. To reinstate the king-soul is the ﬁrst step in a needed revolution — the soul directing the mind will exercise through it its sovereign power over the powers of life and subject to them in their turn an enlightened and psychically consenting body. But this is not all; for soul-discovery is not complete without a psychic new creation of the mental, vital and physical instrumentation of nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind will be recast by the soul’s intuition of Truth, the vital being by its perception of power and good, the body and whole nature by its command for light, harmony and beauty. Our nature will become that of a true psychic entity, not a brute creation uniﬁed by a precarious life and illumined by the candlelight of a struggling intelligence.  166  I mean by the integral Yoga a manysided way or means of selfliberation and self-perfection, a radical change of our entire being by which we grow out of its present mental, vital and physical human ignorance into a large and integral spiritual and divine Consciousness; — as a result of this liberation, this change or transformation there is a union in the spirit with our Divine Origin in its integral Reality, an ascent of all our being and nature into the Divine Existence, the Divine Consciousness, the Divine Bliss or Ananda, and a descent of the Divine inﬁnite Wideness, Light, Knowledge, Force, Joy, Ananda into our entire nature.  167


Sri Aurobindo: Our Yoga is a Yoga of transformation, but a transformation of the whole consciousness and the whole nature from the top to the bottom, from its hidden inward parts to its most tangible external movements. It is neither an ethical change nor a religious conversion, neither sainthood nor ascetic control, neither a sublimation nor a suppression of the life and vital movements that we envisage, nor is it either a gloriﬁcation or a coercive control or rejection of the physical existence. What is envisaged is a change from a lesser to a greater, from a lower to a higher, from a surface to a deeper consciousness — indeed to the largest, highest, deepest possible and a total change and revolution of the whole being in its stuff and mass and every detail into that yet unrealised diviner nature of existence. It means a bringing forward of what is now hidden and subliminal, a growing conscious in what is now superconscient to us, an illumination of the subconscient and subphysical. It implies a substitution of the control of the nature by the soul for its present control by the mind; a transference of the instrumentation of the nature from the outer to the now more than half-veiled inner mind, from the outer to the inner vital or life-self, from the outer to an inner subtler vaster physical consciousness and by this transference a direct and conscious instead of an indirect and unconscious or half conscious contact with the secret cosmic forces that move us; a breaking out from the narrow limited individual into a wide cosmic consciousness; an ascension from mental to spiritual nature; a still farther ascension from the spirit in mind or overspreading mind to the supramental spirit and a descent of that into the embodied being.


Sri Aurobindo: All that has not only to be achieved but organised before the transformation is complete.  168  The ascent to supermanhood will be a radical change of consciousness, force and bliss-power, a potent building of all that is necessary to manifest the new godhead in mind, life and body.  There will be at once an inner revelation and an outer transformation. Something will be born that was not here or was latent and hidden in its own invisible radiances and at the same time there will be a metamorphosis and reversal in our existing structure.


Sri Aurobindo: A creation by a consensus of superior and nether powers is the condition demanded by the Spirit for its decisive works; and this double action, this meeting, consensus, uniﬁcation of the superconscient and subconscient gods in a growing consciousness is the key to the critical revolutions of Nature.  The creation of conscious supermind on the terrestrial plane will be done therefore not only from above by the Spirit but from below by the Earth-Power. The sun of supramental Truth will descend into the body, but also it will awake another secret sun of supramental Truth that was asleep in the foundations and very principle of Matter.  169  The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the greatest that the earth can ask from the Highest, the change that is most difﬁcult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions.


Sri Aurobindo: It is nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and Power into Matter, the supramental established in the material plane and consciousness and the material world and an integral transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a supreme Grace can effect this miracle.  The supreme Power has descended into the most material consciousness but it has stood there behind the density of the physical veil demanding before manifestation, before its great open workings can begin, that the conditions of the supreme Grace shall be there, real and effective. And the ﬁrst condition is that the Truth shall be accepted within you entirely and without reserve before it can be manifested in the material being and Nature.  A total surrender, an exclusive self-opening to the divine inﬂuence, a constant and integral choice of the Truth and rejection of the falsehood, these are the only conditions made.


Sri Aurobindo: But these must be fulﬁlled entirely, without reserve, without any evasion or pretence, simply and sincerely down to the most physical consciousness and its workings[.]   170  Victory in this effort depends upon the sincerity within you, the purity of your aspiration, the burning core of your faith, the absoluteness of your will and surrender[.]  171


Sri Aurobindo: Two things are needed if thou wouldst follow the steep and difﬁcult way of Yoga, the need and will within thee and the call of the Spirit.  The need is the need of the soul, awakened or awaking or striving to come to the surface. For all other may be transitory or false; but the soul’s need is lasting and true.  Thy soul’s need of divine light and the spirit’s perfection can alone bear thee across the darkness of the many nights through which thou must pass, beyond the open or hidden pitfalls of the road, past the dangers of the precipice and the morass, through the battle with giant forces and the clutching of hands that mislead and the delusions of the night and the twilight, through false light and illusive glamour, triumphant over the blows and ordeals and nets and temptations of the gods and on and up to the immeasurable summits[.]  Institutions, empires, civilisations are the marbles of Time.


Sri Aurobindo: Time, sitting in his banqueting hall of the Ages, where prophets and kings are the spice of his banquet, drinking the red wine of life and death, while on the marble ﬂoor at his feet are strewn like ﬂowers the images of the same stars that shone on the pride of Nahusha, the tapasya of Dhruv and the splendours of Yayati, that saw Tiglath-Pileser, Sennacherib and the Egyptian Pharaohs, Pompey’s head hewn off on the sands of Egypt and Caesar bleeding at Pompey’s sculptured feet, Napoleon’s mighty legions thundering victorious at the bidding of that god of war on the ﬁeld of Austerlitz and Napoleon’s panic legions ﬂeeing disordered with pursuit and butchery behind them from that last ﬁeld of Waterloo, — Time, the Kala Purusha, drunk with the fumes of death and the tears and laughter of mortals, sits and plays there with his marbles. There are marbles there of all kinds, marbles of all colours, and some are dull and grey, some glorious with hearts of many colours, some white and pure as a dove’s wings, — but he plays with them all equally  and equally he thrusts them all away when he has done with them. Sometimes even, in his drunkenness, he hurls them out of his window or lifts his mace and deals blows here and there smashing into fragments the bright and brittle globes, and he  laughs as they smash and crumble.


Sri Aurobindo: So Time, the god, sits and plays for ever with his marbles.  It is a superstition of modern thought that the march of knowledge has in all its parts progressed always in a line of forward progress deviating from it, no doubt, in certain periods of obscuration, but always returning and in the sum constituting everywhere an advance and nowhere a retrogression. Like all superstitions this belief is founded on bad and imperfect observation ﬂowering into a logical fallacy. Our observation is necessarily imperfect because we have at our disposal the historical data and literary records of only a few millenniums and beyond only disjected and insufﬁcient indices which leave gigantic room for the hardly-fettered activity of the mind’s two chief helpers and misleaders, inference and conjecture. Our observation is bad because, prepossessed by the ﬁxed idea of a brief & recent emergence from immemorial barbarism, imagining Plato to have blossomed in a few centuries out of a stock only a little more advanced than the South Sea islander, we refuse to seek in the records that still remain of a lost superior knowledge their natural and coherent signiﬁcance; we twist them rather into the image of our own thoughts or conﬁne them within the still narrow limits of what we ourselves know and understand.


Sri Aurobindo: The logical fallacy we land in as the goal of our bad observation is the erroneous conception that because we are more advanced than certain ancient peoples in our own especial lines of success, as the physical sciences, therefore necessarily we are also more advanced in other lines where we are still infants and have only recently begun to observe and experiment, as the science of psychology and the knowledge of our subjective existence and of mental forces. Hence we have developed the exact contrary of the old superstition that the movement of man is always backward to retrogression. While our forefathers believed that the more ancient might on the whole be trusted as more authoritative, because nearer to the gods, and the less ancient less authoritative because nearer to man’s ultimate degeneracy, we believe on the contrary that the more ancient is always on the whole more untrue because nearer to the unlettered and unenquiring savage, the more modern the more true because held as opinion by the lettered and instructed citizen of Paris or Berlin. Neither position can be accepted. Veriﬁcation by experience & experiment is the only standard of truth, not antiquity, not modernity.


Sri Aurobindo: Some of the ideas of the ancients or even of the savage now scouted by us may be lost truths or statements of valid experience from which we have turned or become oblivious; many of the notions of the modern schoolmen will certainly in the future be scouted as erroneous and superstitious.   Among the ancient documents held by the ancients to be deep mines of profound and fertile truth but to us forgetful and blind of their meaning the Veda & Upanishads rank among the very highest.   [.....] Driven from all other ﬁelds by a perception of the slow and aeonic processes of Nature, the mushroom theory of existence took refuge in this ill-explored corner of scientiﬁc theory.


Sri Aurobindo: Thence, although later discoveries have had an enlarging effect, it still hampers the growth of more thoughtful generalisations.  The time-limit allowed for the growth of civilisation is still impossibly short and in consequence an air of unreality hangs over the application of the evolutionary idea to our human development. Nor is this essential objection cured by any evidence of the modernity of human civilisation. Its great antiquity is denied merely on the absence [of] afﬁrmative data; there are no positive indications to support the denial; but where data are scanty, such a negative basis is in the last degree unsound and precarious. We can no longer argue that no ancient civilisations can have existed of which the traces have entirely perished and that prehistoric means, necessarily, savage and undeveloped.


Sri Aurobindo: History on the contrary abounds with instances of great societies which were within an ace of disappearing without leaving any visible memorial behind them and recent excavations have shown that such disappearances in ancient times have been even not uncommon. We cannot have exhausted all that the earth contains. There should be the remains of other civilisations yet undiscovered & there may well have been yet others which because of the manner of their disappearance or for other causes have left no traces at all whether upon the surface of the earth or under it. Indeed with regard to no object or previous existence, no silent or imperfectly documented [?scene], is it safe to argue that because there are no traces or sufﬁcient evidence of it, therefore it never existed.  Yet in many ﬁelds of generalisation modern scholarship has used substantially this argument with a prodigal freedom.


Sri Aurobindo: It is at least possible that mighty cities and noble civilisations ﬁlled with their rumour the now silent spaces of Time for countless millenniums before Egypt and Assyria rose into their historic greatness.  Brief lapse of time is not indeed the cardinal point of the savage theory and even if larger time-spaces are allowed, the theory itself need not fall. But I have urged the question of time as of primary moment not for the overthrow of the modern explanation but for the readmission of another and more ancient synthesis. For if once we allow the existence of prehistoric civilisations older, it would seem, than the Egyptian, — such as may be argued from the deep-buried cities of Asia, — and the presence in an unknown antiquity of great national cultures where now the savage or the semi-savage swarm uncreative and unreﬂecting, — such as may be argued from the ruins of Mashonaland or the state of mediaeval Barbary after the ravages of Moor and Vandal or even the fate which overtook for almost a millennium the magniﬁcent structure of Graeco-Roman culture and threatened even to blot out its remnants and ruins, — the question then arises, what was the nature of these forgotten civilisations and how was the relapse to barbarism often of an extreme form, so completely effected. These gigantic spaces of time, this worldwide rise and fall of human society, this swaying to and fro from darkness to light and light to darkness leave the ground open for another explanation which is in some respects the reverse of the savage theory, — for the Hindu explanation.


Sri Aurobindo: For the Hindu mind has never admitted the principle in Nature of progress in a straight line. Progress in a straight line only appears to occur and so appears only because we concentrate our scrutiny on limited sections of the curve that Nature is following. But if we stand away from this too near and detailed scrutiny and look at the world in its large masses, we perceive that its journeying forward has no straightness in it of any kind but is rather effected in a series of cycles of which the net result is progress. The image of this apparent straight line is that of the ship which seems to its crew to be journeying on the even plain of the waters but is really describing the curve of the earth in a way perceptible only to a more distant and instructed vision.  Moreover even the small section of the curve which we are examining & which to our limited vision seems to be a straight line is the result of a series of zigzags and is caused by the conﬂict of forces arriving by a continual struggle at a continual compromise or working out by their prolonged discord a temporary harmony.


Sri Aurobindo: The image of the actual progress in cycles is the voyaging in Space of the planets which describe always the same curve round their ﬂaming & luminous sun, image of the perfect strength, joy, beauty, beneﬁcence and knowledge towards which our evolution yearns. The cycle is always the same ellipse, yet by the simultaneous movement of the whole system the completed round ﬁnds the planet at a more advanced station in Space than its preceding journey. It is in this way, by an ever-swaying battle, a prodigal destruction and construction, a labouring forward in ever-progressing curves and ellipses that Nature advances to her secret consummation.  These are the conceptions we ﬁnd expressed in the Puranic symbols familiar to our imagination. There is the Kalpa of a thousand ages with its term of fourteen Manwantaras dividing a sub-cycle of a hundred chaturyugas; there is the dharma, the well-harmonised law of being, perfect in the golden period of the Satya, impaired progressively in bronze Treta and copper Dwapara, collapsing in the iron Kali only to open the way by its disintegration to the manifestation in the next Satya of the old law, truth or natural principle of existence arranged in a new harmony.


Sri Aurobindo: There is throughout this zigzag, this rhythm of rise and fall and rise again brought about by the struggle of upward, downward and stationary forces. There are the alternate triumphs of deva and daitya, helping god and opposing or too violently forward-striving Titan; — the dharmasya glani and abhyutthanam adharmasya, when harmony is denied and discord or wrong harmony established, and then the Avatara and the dharmasya sansthapanam, eternal Light and Force descending, restoring, effecting a new temporary adjustment of the world’s ways to the truth of things and of man.  Translated into more modern but not necessarily more accurate language these symbols point us to a world history not full of the continual, ideal, straightforward victory of good and truth, not progress conceived as the Europeans conceive it, a continual joyous gallop through new & ever new changes to an increasing perfection, but rather of the alternately triumphant forces of progress and regression, a toiling forward and a sliding backward, — the continual revolution of human nature upon itself which yet undoubtedly has but conceals & seems not to have its secret of deﬁnite aim and ultimate exultant victory. In certain respects the old Vedantic thinkers anticipate us; they agree with all that is essential in our modern ideas of evolution.  From one side all forms of creatures are developed; some kind of physical evolution from the animal to the human body is admitted in the Aitareya.


Sri Aurobindo: The Taittiriya suggests the psychological progress of man, and the psychological progress of race cannot be different in principle from the evolution of the individual — a proceeding from the material, the emotionally and mentally inert man upwards [?through] the mental to [?our] spiritual fulﬁlment. The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the ﬁsh through the animal, the man-animal and the developed human being to the different stages of our present incomplete evolution. But the ancient Hindu, it is clear, envisaged this progression as an enormous secular movement covering more ages than we can easily count.  He believed that Nature has repeated it over & over again, as indeed it is probable that she has done, resuming brieﬂy & in sum at each start what she had previously accomplished in detail, slowly & with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas.


Sri Aurobindo: It is for this reason that he assigned to his civilisation those immense eras and those ancient and far backward beginnings which strike the modern as so incredible. He may have erred; recent discoveries & indications are increasingly tending to convince us that nineteenth century scholarship has erred equally in the opposite direction.  Translated again into modern language the Hindu idea of the chaturyuga, four Ages, with all the attendant Puranic circumstances persists as the tradition of a period just such as has been postulated, a period of natural and perfect poise in his knowledge, action and temper between man and his environment. The ideas, the knowledge, the temper, the spirit of this great epoch of civilisation, — but not its institutions or practices — is preserved for us in the Veda and Vedanta, and all existing human societies, civilised or barbarous, go back for the origins of their thought, character & effort to the general type of humanity that was then formed.  The peculiar and striking opposition of thought, temperament, culture and manners between Asia and Europe has been a commonplace of observation and criticism since the times when Herodotus noted in his history the objection of both men and women to be seen naked as a curious and amusing trait of Asiatic barbarism.


Sri Aurobindo: Much water has ﬂown under the bridges since Herodotus wrote and in this respect Asia seems not only to have infected Europe with this “barbaric” trait of manners, but to have been far outstripped by her pupil in the development of sartorial superﬂuities. Excessive wealth and gorgeous splendour was also quoted as a characteristic of Asiatic barbarism from the time of the classical poets. Europe has seen to it that this charge shall only apply now in a very minimum quantity to the eastern continent. Asia now stands, not only by choice of her ascetics, but by economic compulsion for the simple life, and the ostentation of wealth which was once depreciated as a sign of oriental barbarism now parades itself, much vulgarised, at least to our barbaric eastern notion of aesthetics as the splendid face of occidental civilisation. But if circumstances have changed, the essential opposition abides; East is still East in its soul and West is still West and the misunderstanding of continents still ﬂourishes, not only in the minds of politicians and “statesmen”, — where one would naturally expect to ﬁnd it, since it is there that vulgar prejudices, half-truths, whole untruths and unintelligent commonplaces assume their most solemn and sententious form, coin themselves into glittering phrases or ﬂow in rhetorical periods, — but in the minds too of critics, poets and leading intellectuals.


Sri Aurobindo: Faced with this continued misunderstanding, one is obliged to ask whether it is really incurable, an antinomy on which Nature is resolved to insist until the end of this cycle.  Some of us, temerarious idealists, have thought that the misconception, the want of understanding is not only curable, but that to cure it as soon as may be is essential to the future interests of humanity. For my part I hold that all antinomies and opposed powers in this world of contradictions would be much better for an attempt to understand each other’s souls and ﬁnd their meeting point, would ﬁnd something helpful not only to tone down their own exaggerations, but to ﬁll in and round themselves without losing what is essential to their own spirit.  Recently there has been a distinct widening in many minds, a nearer approach to understanding, almost to fusion. A little while ago in the ﬁrst lyrical enthusiasm of the war and its “sacred unions” one imagined that a decisive step had been taken and the peoples themselves would now be ready for sympathy and understanding.


Sri Aurobindo: But it seems it is not quite so yet[.]  The progress of distance-bridging inventions, our modern facility for the multiplication of books and their copies and the increase of human curiosity are rapidly converting humanity into a single intellectual unit with a common fund of knowledge and ideas and a uniﬁed culture. The process is far from complete, but the broad lines of the plan laid down by the great Artiﬁcer of things already begin to appear. For a time this uniﬁcation was applied to Europe only. Asia had its own triune civilisation, predominatingly spiritual, complex and meditative in India, predominatingly vital, emotional, active and simplistic in the regions of the Hindu Kush and Mesopotamia, predominatingly intellectual, mechanical and organised in the Mongolian empires.


Sri Aurobindo: East, West and South had their widely separate spirit and traditions, but one basis of spirituality, common tendencies and such commerce of art, ideas and information as the difﬁculties of communication allowed, preserved the fundamental unity of Asia. East & West only met at their portals, in war oftener than in peace and through that shock and contact inﬂuenced but did not mingle with each other. It was the discovery of Indian philosophy and poetry which broke down the barrier. For the ﬁrst time Europe discovered something in the East which she could study not only with the curiosity which she gave to Semitic and Mongolian ideas and origins, but with sympathy and even with some feeling of identity. This metaphysics, these epics and dramas, this formulated jurisprudence and complex society had methods and a form which, in spite of their diversity from her own, yet presented strong points of contact; she could recognise them, to a certain extent she thought she could understand.


Sri Aurobindo: The speculativeness of the German, the lucidity of the Gaul, the imagination and aesthetic emotionalism of the British Celt found something to interest them, something even to assist. In the teachings of Buddha, the speculation of Shankara, the poetry of Kalidasa their souls could ﬁnd pasture and refreshment. The alien form and spirit of Japanese and Arabian poetry and of Chinese philosophy which prevented such an approximation with the rest of Asia, was not here to interfere with the comprehension of the human soul & substance. There was indeed a single exception which remarkably illustrates the difﬁculty of which I speak. The art of India contradicted European notions too vitally to be admitted into the European consciousness; its charm and power were concealed by the uncouthness to Western eyes of its form and the strangeness of its motives and it is only now, after the greatest of living art-critics in England had published sympathetic appreciations of Indian art and energetic propagandists like Mr. Havell had persevered in their labour, that the European vision is opening to the secret of Indian painting & sculpture.


Sri Aurobindo: But the art of Japan presented certain outward characteristics on which the European could readily seize. Japanese painting had already begun to make its way into Europe even before the victories of Japan and its acceptance of much of the outward circumstances of European civilisation opened a broad door into Europe for all in Japan that Europe can receive without unease or the feeling of an incompatible strangeness. Japanese painting, Japanese dress, Japanese decoration are not only accepted as a part of Western life by the select few and the cultured classes but known and allowed, without being adopted, by the millions. Asiatic civilisation has entered into Europe as deﬁnitely though not so victoriously as European civilisation into Asia. It is only the beginning, but so was it only the beginning when a few scholars alone rejoiced in the clarity of Buddhistic Nihilism, Schopenhauer rested his soul on the Upanishads and Emerson steeped himself in the Gita.


Sri Aurobindo: No one could have imagined then that a Hindu monk would make converts in London and Chicago or that a Vedantic temple would be built in San Francisco and AngloSaxon Islamites erect a Musulman mosque in Liverpool. It appears from a recent inquiry that the only reading, omitting works of ﬁction, which commands wide and general interest among public library readers is either scientiﬁc works or books replete with Asiatic mysticism. How signiﬁcant is this fact when we remember that these are the two powers, Europe & Asia, the victorious intellect and the insurgent spirit, which are rising at this moment to do battle for the mastery of the uniﬁed world.  Nevertheless it is not the public library reader, that man in the street of the literary world, but the increasing circle of men of culture and a various curiosity through whom the Orient & the Occident must ﬁrst meet in a common humanity and the day dawn when some knowledge of the substance of [the] Upanishads will be as necessary to an universal culture as a knowledge of the substance of the Bible, Shankara’s theories as familiar as the speculations of Teutonic thinkers and Kalidasa, Valmekie & Vyasa as near and common to the subject matter of the European critical intellect as Dante or Homer.  It is the difﬁculties of presentation that prevent a more rapid and complete commingling.


Sri Aurobindo: It is signiﬁcant of the tendencies of the twentieth century that all its great and typical events should have occurred no longer as in the last few centuries in Europe, but in Asia. The Russo-Japanese war, the Chinese Revolution, the constitutional changes in Turkey & Persia and last but most momentous the revival however indeterminate as yet of the soul of India, are the really signiﬁcant events of the young century. In Europe except in its one Asiatic corner there has been no event of corresponding magnitude & importance. The abortive orgy of revolutionary fury in Russia, the growth of enormous strikes, the failure of the peace movement, the increase of legislation stamped with the pressure of a materialistic Socialism, although they may hold in themselves germs of greater things, are so far mere indistinct material symptoms of disorganisation & a disease vainly doctored with palliatives, not events of a deﬁnite movement of new birth & regeneration. The importance of this new tendency lies in the fact that great events in Europe, even when they are outwardly spiritual, have usually an intellectual or social trend & signiﬁcance, but great events in Asia have even when they are outwardly intellectual, social or political a spiritual signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore when Asia once more becomes the theatre of the world’s chief events, it is a sure sign that some great spiritual revolution, perhaps a great age of spirituality is preparing for humanity.  Everybody can feel, even without any need of a special sense for the hidden forces and tendencies concealed in the apparent march of things, for the signs are already apparent, that India is on the verge, in some directions already in the ﬁrst movements of a great renascence, more momentous, more instinct with great changes and results, than anything that has gone before it. Every new awakening of the kind comes by some impact slight or great on the national consciousness which puts it in face of new ideas, new conditions, new needs, the necessity of readaptation to a changing environment. The spirit of the nation has to take account of its powers and possibilities and is stirred by a will to new formation and new creation. The change does not always amount to a renascence.


Sri Aurobindo: But the impact in which we live at the present hour is nothing less than that of a new world. It is not merely the pressure of the whole Western civilisation upon the ancient spirit of the East or of modernism on a great traditional civilisation, but it is a great worldwide change, an approaching new birth of mankind itself of which the change in us is only a part. Therefore the result that we are face to face with, is a renascence, the birth of the Spirit into a new body, new forms in society and politics, new forms of literature, art, science, philosophy, action and creation of all kinds. And the question arises what in the great play of modiﬁcation and interchange around us are we going to take from the world around us, how are we going to shape [it] in the stress of our own spirit and past traditions, and what are we going to bring out of ourselves and impress upon the world in exchange? In what new forms is the spirit of India going to embody itself and what relations will its new creations have with the future of the world?


Sri Aurobindo: Where we stand, not only in literature, but in all things, is at or near a great turning point in which the thoughts and forms of East and West, both in an immense ferment of change, are working upon each other to produce something great, unforeseeable and unprecedented. From the less worldwide viewpoint which most nearly concerns us in this country, we may say, that we ﬁnd ourselves in a great hour of rebirth of the ancient soul of India.  The momentous issues of this hour are producing their inevitable upheaval, change and effort at creation in the whole national life, politics, society, economical conditions, industry, commerce, as well as and more noisily than in literature. But it is perhaps in art, literature and science that the future will see what was most deﬁnitive in the creations of the present hour, the most signiﬁcant thing in the Indian renascence; for these things reveal most freely the spirit which is coming to birth; they have found their ﬁeld, discovered their motive; the rest is still only a primary effort to escape out of unnatural conditions; the ﬁeld has there yet to be made clear, before the struggling spiritual motive can make itself dominant and create its appropriate forms. Especially, is the movement of literature most revelatory; for while music and art reveal perhaps more absolutely the soul of a nation, literature is the whole expression of its mind and psychology, — not only of what it is in action, or what it is in essence, but its thought, character and aspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: In literature, as in all else, we stand in India at the opening of a new age, in an hour of national rebirth and in the midst of a number of tendencies, possibilities, movements of which only a few have as yet formed for themselves distinct shapes, plainly decipherable signs. It is an hour not yet of accomplishment, but of travail and inception. What will be born of this dim travail, these shapeless or half-shaped beginnings, is no doubt already decided in the secret spirit of the age and in the subconscient mind of the people. Behind the waverings and strivings of our twilit surface minds the soul of India knows no doubt what it intends and is moving us to great fulﬁlments. But it is well also for us to ponder and inquire what it is the national soul and the soul of humanity demand from us and on what paths we are most likely to give our energies and efforts the maximum power and serviceableness to the great age of mankind and of India on which we are entering.


Sri Aurobindo: For at such a moment there are usually many false starts and many misdirected aims and by seeing our way and our goal more clearly we may better be able to avoid the waste of energy, talent and even genius to which they give rise.  When the human being puts forth a force in himself which is considerable but acts normally, we call it talent; when it is abnormal in its working we call it genius. It would seem, therefore, that genius is in reality some imperfect step in evolution by which mankind in its most vigorous and forward individuals is attempting to develop a faculty which the race as a whole is not strong enough as yet to command or to acclimatise. As always happens in such a movement, there is a considerable irregularity in the working of the new phenomenon. Sometimes Nature seems to prepare by heredity for these its new experiments & ﬁne ﬂowers of humanity[.]


Sri Aurobindo: The greatest poets are usually those who arise either out of a large simple and puissant environment or out of a movement of mind that is grandiose, forceful & elemental. When man becomes excessively reﬁned in intellect, curious in aesthetic sensibility or minute & exact in intellectual reasoning, it becomes more & more difﬁcult to write great and powerful poetry. Ages of accomplished intellectuality & scholarship or of strong scientiﬁc rationality are not favourable to the birth of great poets or, if they are born, not favourable to the free & untrammelled action of their gifts. They remain great, but their greatness bends under a load; there is a lack of triumphant spontaneity and they do not draw as freely or directly from the sources of human action & character. An untameable elemental force is needed to overcome more than partially the denials of the environment.


Sri Aurobindo: For poetry, even though it appeals in passing to the intellect & aesthetic sense, does not proceed from them but is in its nature an elemental power proceeding from the secret & elemental Power within which sees directly & creates sovereignly, & it passes at once to our vital & elemental parts. Intellect and the aesthetic faculties are necessary to the perfection of our critical enjoyment; but they were only assistants, not the direct agents of this divine birth.  Out of the inﬁnite silence of the past, peopled only to the eye of history or the ear of the Yogin, a few voices arise which speak for it, express it and are the very utterance and soul of those unknown generations, of that vanished and now silent humanity. These are the voices of the poets. We whose souls are drying up in this hard and parched age of utilitarian and scientiﬁc thought when men value little beyond what gives them exact and useful knowledge or leads them to some outward increase of power & pleasure, we who are beginning to neglect & ignore poetry and can no longer write it greatly & well, — just as we have forgotten how to sculpture like the Greeks, paint like the mediaeval Italians or build like the Buddhists, — are apt to forget this grand utility of the poets, one noble faculty among their many divine and unusual powers.


Sri Aurobindo: The kavi or vates, poet & seer, is not the manishi; he is not [the] logical thinker, scientiﬁc analyser or metaphysical reasoner; his knowledge is one not with his thought, but with his being ; he has not arrived at it but has it in himself by virtue of his power to become one with all that is around him. By some form of spiritual, vital and emotional oneness, he is what he sees; he is the hero thundering in the forefront of the battle, the mother weeping over her dead, the tree trembling violently in the storm, the ﬂower warmly penetrated with the sunshine. And because he is these things, therefore he knows them; because he knows thus, spiritually & not rationally, he can write of them. He feels their delight & pain, he shares their virtue & sin, he enjoys their reward or bears their punishment.


Sri Aurobindo: It is for this reason that poetry written out of the intellect is so inferior to poetry written out of the soul, is, — even as poetical thinking, — so inferior to the thought that comes formed by inscrutable means out of the soul. For this reason, too, poets of otherwise great faculty, have failed to give us living men and women or really to show to our inner vision even the things of which they write eloquently or sweetly, because they are content to write about them after having seen them with the mind only, and have not been able or have not taken care ﬁrst to be the things of which they would write and then not so much write about them as let them pour themselves out in speech that is an image of the soul. They have been too easily attracted by the materials of poetry, artha & shabda; drawn by some power & charm in the substance of speech, captivated by some melody, harmony or colour in the form of speech, arrested by some strong personal emotion which clutches at expression or gropes for expression in these externals of poetry they have forgotten to bathe in the Muse’s deepest springs.  Therefore among those ancient voices, even when the literature of the ages has been winnowed & chosen by Time, there are very few who recreate for us in poetic speech deeply & mightily the dead past, because they were that past, not so much themselves as the age & nation in which they lived and not so much even the age and nation as that universal humanity which in spite of all differences, under them and within them, even expressing its unity through them is the same in every nation and in every age. Others give us only fragments of thought or outbursts of feeling or reveal to us scattered incidents of sight, sound and outward happening.


Sri Aurobindo: These are complete, vast, multitudinous, inﬁnite in a way, impersonal & many-personed in their very personality, not divine workmen merely but true creators endowed by God with something of His divine power and offering therefore in their works some image of His creative activity.  God has a personality but no character; He is as we say in our Eastern thought, Anantaguna, of an inﬁnite variation of qualities without ﬁxed limitation or rigid distinction and incompatibility.  His superhuman cruelty melts into and harmonises with His ineffable pity; His ﬁerce enmity is one mask of His intensest love. For, being alone existent, He is irresponsible and the harmonies He creates, are the ﬁgment of His own plastic will and governed by laws of aesthetics determined in His own unfettered but infallible fantasy. Out of His inﬁnite personality He creates all these characters & their inevitable actions & destinies.


Sri Aurobindo: So it is with every divine creator, — with Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa. It is perfectly true that each has his own style of language & creation, his own preferred system or harmony of the poetic Art, just as the creator of this universe has fashioned it in a particular style & rhythm & on certain preferred & ﬁxed canons, differing from that of the other universes He may have built in His inﬁnite Being. But within that style & harmony they are not bound by any ﬁxed personality. It is rather the inﬁnite they express though through their personality, than their personality through their works. The writers who are limited by their personality may be among the ﬁne artists of literature; they cannot be among the greatest creators; for to the creator freedom & inﬁnity are necessary attributes.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the inﬁnite alone that can create; the ﬁnite can only manufacture, reproduce or at the most bring out a ﬁne art & craftsmanship. Among all the Elizabethan dramatists Shakespeare alone has produced living men; the rest are only admirable, trivial or monstrous sketches, caricatures or images of men. There is, however, one exception to this rule; every man can at his best moments cast out, create in some way or another — for in our Indian languages the word for creating is casting out, letting free out of one’s own being — one living creature & character, — himself. Milton has produced several bold & beautiful or ﬁne outlines or descriptions, but only one living being, the rebel Archangel Satan, and only so in the ﬁrst four books of Paradise Lost does Satan really live. When Milton ceases to portray himself in his fallen state and thinks only of his plot & subject, Satan also ceases to live.


Sri Aurobindo: But the great impersonal creators even in their slightest creations, cannot help creating life. Impersonal, I say, but I do not mean by impersonality the nirguna, devoid or pure of quality, but rather the unﬁxed & unlimited by quality, — an inﬁnite & indeﬁnable personality out of which is not manufactured or cunningly shaped but perfectly & inevitably arises under the compelling eye of an intuitive Will to be this created world of innumerable brilliantly-coloured variously outlined individual existences.  This is the story of a dream that often came & always ﬂed, a dream that continued by snatches and glimpses through a succession of nights, at intervals of weeks, the mind returning again and again to the unﬁnished vision, the imagination and intuition ﬁlling in the gaps & interstices of a half told tale.   Visions of waters blue in an immortal sunlight or grey in the drifting of a magic welter of cloud & rain, rocks swept by the surf and whistling in their hollows with the wind, island meadows & glades many pictured above the sea, rivers and haze-purpled hills, a scene of unimaginable beauty where forms moved that had not lost the pristine beauty of man before the clutch stiffened on him of early decay & death, of grief and old age, where hearts beat that had not lost the pulsations of our ancient immortality and were not yet attuned to the broken rhythms of pain & grief.


Sri Aurobindo: The impression of such an atmosphere & background remains which the linking of ineffective details & the effort of words which are laden with the thoughts of an afﬂicted and oppressed humanity, strive vainly to restore. For those colours we have lost. When we speak of brightness, it is a subdued brilliance that is the utmost our imaginations can conceive; we mean only a broken hint of rapture when we talk even most eagerly of enjoyment & bliss.  It is not only that the sable blackness of the crow’s wings has in it wonderful shades of green and violet and purple which show themselves under certain stresses of sunlight, but that the black itself, sable of wing or dingy of back & breast has itself a beauty which our prejudiced habits of mind obscure to us. Under its darkness, we see, too, a glint of dingy white.


Sri Aurobindo: We live under the reign of Science, a reign which from the mouth of its hierophants claims to be a tyranny or at least an absolute monarchy. It makes this claim by right of the great things it has done, of the immense utilities with which it has served, helped, strengthened, liberated, mankind, right knowledge of the world, an increasing and already fabulous mastery of Nature, a clear and free intellectual vision of things and masterful dealing with them, liberation from the fetters of ignorance, from blind subjection to authority, from unquestioning political, social, religious and cultural tradition with all their hindrance and their evil.  In a word, the religious tendency, the religious spirit in man does not escape from the law of evolution that governs the other parts of his complex psychological nature. Even though its very reason of existence is the inner sense of a soul and spirit within and around us and the search for spiritual truth and experience, that must be in their very nature a suprarational truth and experience, it begins like the rest with an infrarational instinct, an infrarational formulation, falls under the inﬂuence of the reasoning mind and only at its []  A pragmatic mentalism would not be in its essential principle other than the attempt already made by the race to make the intellectual Reason the governor of life, but this has been done hitherto by a reason preoccupied with the external fact and subjected to it; mind has attempted to read the law of life and its possibilities and organise life anew within those limits by invention, device, regulation, mechanisms of many kinds, or it has attempted to govern life by mental ideals of an abstract order, such as democracy or socialism, and devise an appropriate machinery materialising that mental abstraction so as to make the dominance of the idea practical and viable.


Sri Aurobindo: A subjectivist pragmatic mentalism would try to act more subtly and plastically on life; it would seek for “truth of being”, some idea or ideal of its perfection or practice or efﬁciency, right way of being or living, and attempt to let that grow in the individual and govern his nature, grow in the collective life and govern its formations. Or it would place the development and organisation of the mental life of man as the primary consideration and life and society as a convenience for this true aim of human existence. A new civilisation no longer vitalistic or mainly political and economic, but intellectual, cultural, idealistic, taking up the ancient ideal of man, the perfected mental being in an ennobled life and sound body, a great expansion of human mind and intellect, a mankind more mentally alive, even a human race grown capable of culture and not only of a greater external civilisation, thus fulﬁlling on a large human and universal scale the tendencies which in the past appeared only in a few favoured countries and epochs and even then imperfectly and mostly in a cultured class, might be the consequence of this change. That prospect has its attractions, and for the humanist and the intellectual it is in one form or another their utopia of the future. But this would not really carry the human evolution farther; it would only give it for a time a larger, ﬁner and freer movement in its widest attainable circle.


Sri Aurobindo: If the mentality remained too pragmatic, too eager to rationalise or organise life according to the idea, the peril of mechanisation and standardisation would be there. If the mental ideas governing the individual and social life took a settled form, became a cultural system of the mind, this system would after a time exhaust its possibilities and human life would settle down into a groove, satisﬁed and non-evolutive, as happened in the Graeco-Roman world or in China or elsewhere where the mental intellect became the predominant power of life. If this arrest were avoided either by the multiplication of different cultures — different peoples acting upon each other but escaping the tendency to replication and standardisation which is the tendency of the human collective mind or by a free progressiveness of the human intelligence making constantly new ideas, new ideals, still the movement would eventually be in a circle or an ellipsis which could be a constant description of a new-old movement in the same ﬁeld. In fact our external mind moving on the surface tends always to exhaust itself rapidly; if it expends itself slowly, conservatively, at a leisurely pace, it can create a civilisation and culture which will last for centuries or even for one or more thousands of years; but that too will exhaust itself in time; if it throws itself into a brilliant or rapid movement as in ancient Greece or in modern Europe a few centuries are likely to see the end of this ﬂaming up as of a new star. Afterwards there must be stagnation, decline and a renewal of the mental circle.


Sri Aurobindo: This is because mind and thought are not the sovereign principle or highest term of our existence; mind and thought therefore can to a certain extent fulﬁl themselves, but they cannot fulﬁl life nor can they give to man his complete self. Mind is an instrument, not the self of man; nor the complete reality or highest reality of his being. It is a mediator between the being and life; it seeks to know truth of being and truth of life and bring them together. Truth of idea therefore is effective only so far as it can interpret truth of spirit and truth of life, it has itself no essential existence; when it erects itself as a mental abstraction, it has no reality and no effective power; it is only an index, a ﬁgure. It can become effective only by taking up life and catching hold of some vital force to effectuate it, but usually it ends by [ . . . ], exhausting or stereotyping and sterilising the force it uses; or it can become effective only when it canalises and brings out into action of mind and life an inner truth of being, a truth of spirit and it is then powerful only so long as it replenishes itself from its spiritual source and so keeps itself true and alive.


Sri Aurobindo: Justice, one says; but what is Justice? Plato’s question applies to this as to every other sacred icon set up by men for their worship.  Justice for each man is what his own type of mind accepts as right and proper and equitable as between men and men. Or, it might be added, between the community and its constituents, the State and its citizens.


Sri Aurobindo: 1.  There are two allied powers in man; knowledge & wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.  2.  Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast & eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.


Sri Aurobindo: 3.  When I speak, the reason says, “This will I say”; but God  takes the word out of my mouth and the lips say something else at which reason trembles.  4.  I am not a Jnani, for I have no knowledge except what God gives me for His work.


Sri Aurobindo: How am I to know whether what I see be reason or folly? Nay, it is neither; for the thing seen is simply true & neither folly nor reason.   5.  If mankind could but see though in a glimpse of ﬂeeting experience what inﬁnite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all & never rest till they had gained these treasures.


Sri Aurobindo: But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust & scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.   6.  Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.  7.


Sri Aurobindo: What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.  8.  Reason divides, ﬁxes details & contrasts them; Wisdom uniﬁes, marries contrasts in a single harmony.  9.


Sri Aurobindo: Either do not give the name of knowledge to your beliefs only and of error, ignorance or charlatanism to the beliefs of others, or do not rail at the dogmas of the sects and their intolerance.   10.  What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.  11.


Sri Aurobindo: My soul knows that it is immortal. But you take a dead body to pieces and cry triumphantly “Where is your soul and where is your immortality?”   12.  Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn & deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.


Sri Aurobindo: 13.  They proved to me by convincing reasons that God did not exist, and I believed them. Afterwards I saw God, for He came and embraced me. And now which am I to believe, the reasonings of others or my own experience?  14.


Sri Aurobindo: They told me, “These things are hallucinations.” I inquired what was a hallucination and found that it meant a subjective or a psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality. Then I sat and wondered at the miracles of the human reason.  15.  Hallucination is the term of Science for those irregular glimpses we still have of truths shut out from us by our preoccupation with matter; coincidence for the curious touches of artistry in the work of that supreme & universal Intelligence which in its conscious being as on a canvas has planned & executed the world.


Sri Aurobindo: 16.  That which men term a hallucination is the reﬂection in the mind & senses of that which is beyond our ordinary mental & sensory perceptions. Superstition arises from the mind’s wrong understanding of these reﬂections. There is no other hallucination.  17.


Sri Aurobindo: Do not, like so many modern disputants, smother thought under polysyllables or charm inquiry to sleep by the spell of formulas and cant words. Search always; ﬁnd out the reason for things which seem to the hasty glance to be mere chance or illusion.  18.  Someone was laying it down that God must be this or that or He would not be God. But it seemed to me that I can only know what God is and I do not see how I can tell Him what He ought to be.


Sri Aurobindo: For what is the standard by which we can judge Him? These judgments are the follies of our egoism.  19.  Chance is not in this universe; the idea of illusion is itself an illusion. There was never illusion yet in the human mind that was not the concealing [?shape] and disﬁgurement of a truth.


Sri Aurobindo: 20.  When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer ﬁnd them.  21.  God had opened my eyes; for I saw the nobility of the vulgar, the attractiveness of the repellent, the perfection of the maimed and the beauty of the hideous.  22.


Sri Aurobindo: Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, “What have I to forgive and whom?”  23.  God struck me with a human hand; shall I say then, “I pardon Thee thy insolence, O God”?  24.  God gave me good in a blow.


Sri Aurobindo: Shall I say, “I forgive thee, O Almighty One, the harm and the cruelty, but do it not again”?  25.  When I pine at misfortune and call it evil, or am jealous and disappointed, then I know that there is awake in me again the eternal fool.  26.  When I see others suffer, I feel that I am unfortunate, but the wisdom that is not mine, sees the good that is coming and approves.


Sri Aurobindo: 27.  Sir Philip Sidney said of the criminal led out to be hanged, “There, but for the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.” Wiser, had he said, “There, by the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.”  28.  God is a great & cruel Torturer because He loves.


Sri Aurobindo: You do not understand this, because you have not seen & played with Krishna.  29.  One called Napoleon a tyrant and imperial cut-throat; but I saw God armed striding through Europe.  30.  I have forgotten what vice is and what virtue; I can only see God, His play in the world and His will in humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: 31.  I saw a child wallowing in the dirt and the same child cleaned by his mother and resplendent, but each time I trembled before his utter purity.  32.  What I wished or thought to be the right thing, does not come about; therefore it is clear that there is no All Wise one who guides the world but only blind Chance or a brute Causality.  33.


Sri Aurobindo: The Atheist is God playing at hide & seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.  34.  O Thou that lovest, strike! If Thou strike me not now, I shall know that Thou lov’st me not.


Sri Aurobindo: 35.  O Misfortune, blessed be thou; for through thee I have seen the face of my Lover.  36.  Men are still in love with grief; when they see one who is too high for grief or joy, they curse him & cry, “O thou insensible!” Therefore Christ still hangs on the cross in Jerusalem.


Sri Aurobindo: 37.  Men are in love with sin; when they see one who is too high for vice or virtue, they curse him & cry, “O thou breaker of bonds, thou wicked and immoral one!” Therefore Srikrishna does not live as yet in Brindavun.  38.  Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth.


Sri Aurobindo: They mean on earth; for if Brindavun existed nowhere, the Bhagwat could not have been written.  39.  Strange! the Germans have disproved the existence of Christ; yet his cruciﬁxion remains still a greater historic fact than the death of Caesar.  40.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes one is led to think that only those things really matter which have never happened; for beside them most historic achievements seem almost pale and ineffective.  41.  There are four very great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and cruciﬁxion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavun and the colloquy with Arjuna on the ﬁeld of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavun created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship,) Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity. Yet it is said that none of these four events ever happened.


Sri Aurobindo: 42.  They say that the Gospels are forgeries and Krishna a creation of the poets. Thank God then for the forgeries and bow down before the creators.  43.  If God assigns to me my place in Hell, I do not know why I should aspire to Heaven.


Sri Aurobindo: He knows best what is for my welfare.  44.  If God draw me towards Heaven, then, even if His other hand strive to keep me in Hell, yet must I struggle upward.  45.  Only those thoughts are true the opposite of which is also true in its own time and application; indisputable dogmas are the most dangerous kind of falsehoods.


Sri Aurobindo: 46.  Logic is the worst enemy of Truth, as self-righteousness is the worst enemy of virtue, — for the one cannot see its own errors nor the other its own imperfections.  47.  When I was asleep in the Ignorance, I came to a place of meditation full of holy men and I found their company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground.  48.


Sri Aurobindo: When I read a wearisome book through and with pleasure, yet perceived all the perfection of its wearisomeness, then I knew that my mind was conquered.  49.  I knew my mind to be conquered when it admired the beauty of the hideous, yet felt perfectly why other men shrank back or hated.  50.  To feel & love the God of beauty and good in the ugly and the evil, and still yearn in utter love to heal it of its ugliness and its evil, this is real virtue and morality.


Sri Aurobindo: 51.  To hate the sinner is the worst sin, for it is hating God; yet he who commits it, glories in his superior virtue.  52.  When I hear of a righteous wrath, I wonder at man’s capacity for self-deception.  53.


Sri Aurobindo: This is a miracle that men can love God, yet fail to love humanity. With whom are they in love then?  54.  The quarrels of religious sects are like the disputing of pots, which shall be alone allowed to hold the immortalising nectar. Let them dispute, but the thing for us is to get at the nectar in whatever pot and attain immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: 55.  You say that the ﬂavour of the pot alters the liquor. That is taste; but what can deprive it of its immortalising faculty?  56.  Be wide in me, O Varuna; be mighty in me, O Indra; O Sun, be very bright and luminous; O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness.


Sri Aurobindo: Be ﬁerce and terrible, O Rudra; be impetuous and swift, O Maruts; be strong and bold, O Aryama; be voluptuous and pleasurable, O Bhaga; be tender and kind and loving and passionate, O Mitra. Be bright and revealing, O Dawn; O Night, be solemn and pregnant. O Life, be full, ready & buoyant; O Death, lead my steps from mansion to mansion. Harmonise all these, O Brahmanaspati. Let me not be subject to these gods, O Kali.


Sri Aurobindo: 57.  When, O eager disputant, thou hast prevailed in a debate, then art thou greatly to be pitied; for thou hast lost a chance of widening knowledge.  58.  Because the tiger acts according to his nature and knows not anything else, therefore he is divine and there is no evil in him. If he questioned himself, then he would be a criminal.


Sri Aurobindo: 59.  The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature.  60.  One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating.  People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.


Sri Aurobindo: 61.  There is no mortality. It is only the Immortal who can die; the mortal could neither be born nor perish. There is nothing ﬁnite. It is only the Inﬁnite who can make for Himself limits; the ﬁnite can have no beginning nor end, for the very act of conceiving its beginning & end declares its inﬁnity.


Sri Aurobindo: 62.  I heard a fool discoursing utter folly and wondered what God meant by it; then I considered and saw a distorted mask of truth and wisdom.  63.  God is great, says the Mahomedan. Yes, He is so great that He can afford to be weak, whenever that too is necessary.


Sri Aurobindo: 64.  God often fails in His workings; it is the sign of His illimitable godhead.  65.  Because God is invincibly great, He can afford to be weak; because He is immutably pure, He can indulge with impunity in sin; He knows eternally all delight, therefore He tastes also the delight of pain; He is inalienably wise, therefore He has not debarred Himself from folly.  66.


Sri Aurobindo: Sin is that which was once in its place, persisting now it is out of place; there is no other sinfulness.  67.  There is no sin in man, but a great deal of disease, ignorance and misapplication.  68.  The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections.


Sri Aurobindo: It was God’s corrective for egoism. But man’s egoism meets God’s device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.  69.  Sin & virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection. The sense of virtue helps us to cherish our sins in secret.


Sri Aurobindo: 70.  Examine thyself without pity, then thou wilt be more charitable and pitiful to others.  71.  A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisﬁed with his success to ask anything farther.


Sri Aurobindo: 72.  The sign of dawning Knowledge is to feel that as yet I know little or nothing, & yet, if I could only know my knowledge, I already possess everything.  73.  When Wisdom comes, her ﬁrst lesson is, “There is no such thing as knowledge; there are only aper¸cus of the Inﬁnite Deity.”  74.


Sri Aurobindo: Practical knowledge is a different thing; that is real and serviceable, but it is never complete. Therefore to systematise and codify it is necessary but fatal.   75.  Systematise we must, but even in making & holding the system, we should always keep ﬁrm hold on this truth that all systems are in their nature transitory and incomplete.


Sri Aurobindo: 76.  Europe prides herself on her practical and scientiﬁc organisation and efﬁciency. I am waiting till her organisation is perfect; then a child shall destroy her.  77.


Sri Aurobindo: Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius. It is dangerous for an army to be led by veterans; for on the other side God may place Napoleon.  78.  When knowledge is fresh in us, then it is invincible; when it is old, it loses its virtue. This is because God moves always forward.


Sri Aurobindo: 79.  God is inﬁnite Possibility. Therefore Truth is never at rest; therefore, also, Error is justiﬁed of her children.  80.  To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes.


Sri Aurobindo: 81.  God’s laughter is sometimes very coarse and unﬁt for polite ears; He is not satisﬁed with being Moli`ere, He must needs also be Aristophanes and Rabelais.  82.  If men took life less seriously, they could very soon make it more perfect. God never takes His works seriously; therefore one looks out on this wonderful Universe.


Sri Aurobindo: 83.  Shame has admirable results and both in aesthetics and in morality we could ill spare it; but for all that it is a badge of weakness and the proof of ignorance.   84.  The supernatural is that the nature of which we have not attained or do not yet know, or the means of which we have not yet conquered.


Sri Aurobindo: The common taste for miracles is the sign that man’s ascent is not yet ﬁnished.  85.  It is rationality and prudence to distrust the supernatural; but to believe in it, is also a sort of wisdom.  86.  Great saints have performed miracles; greater saints have railed at them; the greatest have both railed at them and performed them.


Sri Aurobindo: 87.  Open thy eyes and see what the world really is and what God; have done with vain and pleasant imaginations.  88.  This world was built by Death that he might live. Wilt thou abolish death?


Sri Aurobindo: Then life too will perish. Thou canst not abolish death, but thou mayst transform it into a greater living.  89.  This world was built by Cruelty that she might love. Wilt thou abolish cruelty?


Sri Aurobindo: Then love too will perish. Thou canst not abolish cruelty, but thou mayst transﬁgure it into its opposite, into a ﬁerce Love & Delightfulness.  90.  This world was built by Ignorance & Error that they might know. Wilt thou abolish ignorance and error?


Sri Aurobindo: Then knowledge too will perish. Thou canst not abolish ignorance & error, but thou mayst transmute them into the utter & effulgent exceeding of reason.  91.  If Life alone were & not death, there could be no immortality; if love were alone & not cruelty, joy would be only a tepid & ephemeral rapture; if reason were alone & not ignorance, our highest attainment would not exceed a limited rationality & worldly wisdom.  92.


Sri Aurobindo: Death transformed becomes Life that is Immortality; Cruelty transﬁgured becomes Love that is intolerable ecstasy; Ignorance transmuted becomes Light that leaps beyond wisdom and knowledge.  93.  Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance ﬁrst, next equality of soul, last ecstasy.


Sri Aurobindo: 94.  All renunciation is for a greater joy yet ungrasped. Some renounce for the joy of duty done, some for the joy of peace, some for the joy of God and some for the joy of self-torture, but renounce rather as a passage to the freedom and untroubled rapture beyond.  95.  Only by perfect renunciation of desire or by perfect satisfaction of desire can the utter embrace of God be experienced; for in both ways the essential precondition is effected, — desire perishes.


Sri Aurobindo: 96.  Experience in thy soul the truth of the Scripture; afterwards, if thou wilt, reason & state thy experience intellectually & even then distrust thy statement; but distrust never thy experience.  97.  When thou afﬁrmest thy soul-experience & deniest the different soul-experience of another, know that God is making a fool of thee. Dost thou not hear His self-delighted laughter behind thy soul’s curtains?


Sri Aurobindo: 98.  Revelation is the direct sight, the direct hearing or the inspired memory of Truth, drishti, sruti, smriti; it is the highest experience and always accessible to renewed experience. Not because God spoke it, but because the soul saw it, is the word of the Scriptures our supreme authority.  99.  The word of Scripture is infallible; it is in the interpretation the heart and reason put upon the Scripture that error has her portion.


Sri Aurobindo: 100. Shun all lowness, narrowness & shallowness in religious thought & experience. Be wider than the widest horizons, be loftier than the highest Kanchenjunga, be profounder than the deepest oceans.   101.


Sri Aurobindo: In God’s sight there is no near or distant, no present, past or future. These things are only a convenient perspective for His world-picture.   102. To the senses it is always true that the sun moves round the earth; this is false to the reason.


Sri Aurobindo: To the reason it is always true that the earth moves round the sun; this is false to the supreme vision. Neither earth moves nor sun; there is only a change in the relation of sun-consciousness & earth-consciousness.   103. Vivekananda, exalting Sannyasa, has said that in all Indian history there is only one Janaka.


Sri Aurobindo: Not so, for Janaka is not the name of a single individual, but a dynasty of self-ruling kings and the triumph-cry of an ideal.  104. In all the lakhs of ochre-clad Sannyasins, how many are perfect? It is the few attainments and the many approximations that justify an ideal.  105.


Sri Aurobindo: There have been hundreds of perfect Sannyasins, because Sannyasa had been widely preached and numerously practised; let it be the same with the ideal freedom and we shall have hundreds of Janakas.  106. Sannyasa has a formal garb and outer tokens; therefore men think they can easily recognise it; but the freedom of a Janaka does not proclaim itself and it wears the garb of the world; to its presence even Narada was blinded.  107. Hard is it to be in the world, free, yet living the life of ordinary men; but because it is hard, therefore it must be attempted and accomplished.


Sri Aurobindo: 108. When he watched the actions of Janaka, even Narada the divine sage thought him a luxurious worldling and libertine.  Unless thou canst see the soul, how shalt thou say that a man is free or bound?   109.


Sri Aurobindo: All things seem hard to man that are above his attained level, & they are hard to his unaided effort; but they become at once easy & simple when God in man takes up the contract.   110. To see the composition of the sun or the lines of Mars is doubtless a great achievement; but when thou hast the instrument that can show thee a man’s soul as thou seest a picture, then thou wilt smile at the wonders of physical Science as the playthings of babies.


Sri Aurobindo: 111. Knowledge is a child with its achievements; for when it has found out something, it runs about the streets whooping and shouting; Wisdom conceals hers for a long time in a thoughtful and mighty silence.  112. Science talks and behaves as if it had conquered all knowledge: Wisdom, as she walks, hears her solitary tread echoing on the margin of immeasurable Oceans.


Sri Aurobindo: 113. Hatred is the sign of a secret attraction that is eager to ﬂee from itself and furious to deny its own existence. That too is God’s play in His creature.   114.


Sri Aurobindo: Selﬁshness is the only sin, meanness the only vice, hatred the only criminality. All else can easily be turned into good, but these are obstinate resisters of deity.   115. The world is a long recurring decimal with Brahman for its integer.


Sri Aurobindo: The period seems to begin and end, but the fraction is eternal; it will never have an end and never had any real beginning.  116. The beginning and end of things is a conventional term of our experience; in their true existence these terms have no reality, there is no end and no beginning.  117. “Neither is it that I was not before nor thou nor these kings nor that all we shall not be hereafter.”


Sri Aurobindo: Not only Brahman, but beings & things in Brahman are eternal; their creation and destruction is a play of hide and seek with our outward consciousness.  118. The love of solitude is a sign of the disposition towards knowledge; but knowledge itself is only achieved when we have a settled perception of solitude in the crowd, in the battle and in the mart.   119.


Sri Aurobindo: If when thou art doing great actions and moving giant results, thou canst perceive that art doing nothing, then know that God has removed His seal from thy eyelids.   120. If when thou sittest alone, still & voiceless on the mountaintop, thou canst perceive the revolutions thou art conducting, then hast thou the divine vision and art freed from appearances.  121.


Sri Aurobindo: The love of inaction is folly and the scorn of inaction is folly; there is no inaction. The stone lying inert upon the sands which is kicked away in an idle moment, has been producing its effect upon the hemispheres.  122. If thou wouldst not be the fool of Opinion, ﬁrst see wherein thy thought is true, then study wherein its opposite and contradiction is true; last, discover the cause of these differences and the key of God’s harmony.  123.


Sri Aurobindo: An opinion is neither true nor false, but only serviceable for life or unserviceable; for it is a creation of Time and with time it loses its effect and value. Rise thou above opinion and seek wisdom everlasting.  124. Use opinion for life, but let her not bind thy soul in her fetters.


Sri Aurobindo: 125 . Every law, however embracing or tyrannous, meets somewhere a contrary law by which its operation can be checked, modiﬁed, annulled or eluded.  126. The most binding Law of Nature is only a ﬁxed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must ﬁrst open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: 127. Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.  128. Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body?


Sri Aurobindo: This ﬁrst we ought to determine.   129. O son of Immortality, live not thou according to Nature, but according to God; and compel her also to live according to the deity within thee.  130.


Sri Aurobindo: Fate is God’s foreknowledge outside Space & Time of all that in Space & Time shall yet happen; what He has foreseen, Power & Necessity work out by the conﬂict of forces.  131. Because God has willed and foreseen everything, thou shouldst not therefore sit inactive and wait upon His providence, for thy action is one of His chief effective forces. Up then and be doing, not with egoism, but as the circumstance, instrument and apparent cause of the event that He has predetermined.


Sri Aurobindo: 132. When I knew nothing, then I abhorred the criminal, sinful and impure, being myself full of crime, sin and impurity; but when I was cleansed and my eyes unsealed, then I bowed down in my spirit before the thief and the murderer and adored the feet of the harlot; for I saw that these souls had accepted the terrible burden of evil and drained for all of us the greater portion of the churned poison of the world-ocean.   133. The Titans are stronger than the gods because they have agreed with God to front and bear the burden of His wrath and enmity; the gods were able to accept only the pleasant burden of His love and kindlier rapture.


Sri Aurobindo: 134. When thou art able to see how necessary is suffering to ﬁnal delight, failure to utter effectiveness and retardation to the last rapidity, then thou mayst begin to understand something, however faintly and dimly, of God’s workings.  135. All disease is a means towards some new joy of health, all evil & pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss & good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is God’s secret which only the soul puriﬁed of egoism can penetrate.


Sri Aurobindo: 136. Why is thy mind or thy body in pain? Because thy soul behind the veil wishes for the pain or takes delight in it; but if thou wilt — and perseverest in thy will — thou canst impose the spirit’s law of unmixed delight on thy lower members.  137.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no iron or ineffugable law that a given contact shall create pain or pleasure; it is the way the soul meets the rush or pressure of Brahman upon the members from outside them that determines either reaction.  138. The force of soul in thee meeting the same force from outside cannot harmonise the measures of the contact in values of mind-experience & body-experience, therefore thou hast pain, grief or uneasiness. If thou canst learn to adjust the replies of the force in thyself to the questions of world-force, thou shalt ﬁnd pain becoming pleasurable or turning into pure delightfulness.  Right relation is the condition of blissfulness, ritam the key of ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: 139. Who is the superman? He who can rise above this matterregarding broken mental human unit and possess himself universalised and deiﬁed in a divine force, a divine love & joy and a divine knowledge.  140. If thou keepest this limited human ego & thinkest thyself the superman, thou art but the fool of thy own pride, the plaything of thy own force and the instrument of thy own illusions.


Sri Aurobindo: 141. Nietzsche saw the superman as the lion-soul passing out of camel-hood, but the true heraldic device & token of the superman is the lion seated upon the camel which stands upon the cow of plenty. If thou canst not be the slave of all mankind, thou art not ﬁt to be its master and if thou canst not make thy nature as Vasistha’s cow of plenty with all mankind to draw its wish from her udders, what avails thy leonine supermanhood?  142.


Sri Aurobindo: Be to the world as the lion in fearlessness and lordship, as the camel in patience and service, as the cow in quiet, forbearing & maternal beneﬁcence. Raven on all the joys of God as a lion over its prey, but bring also all humanity into that inﬁnite ﬁeld of luxurious ecstasy to wallow there and to pasture.   143. If Art’s service is but to imitate Nature, then burn all the picture galleries and let us have instead photographic studios.


Sri Aurobindo: It is because Art reveals what Nature hides, that a small picture is worth more than all the jewels of the millionaires and the treasures of the princes.  144. If you only imitate visible Nature, you will perpetrate either a corpse, a dead sketch or a monstrosity; Truth lives in that which goes behind & beyond the visible & sensible.  145. O Poet, O Artist, if thou but holdest up the mirror to Nature, thinkest thou Nature will rejoice in thy work?


Sri Aurobindo: Rather she will turn away her face. For what dost thou hold up to her there? Herself? No, but a lifeless outline & reﬂection, a shadowy mimicry. It is the secret soul of Nature thou hast to seize, thou hast to hunt eternally after the truth in the external symbol, and that no mirror will hold for thee, nor for her whom thou seekest.


Sri Aurobindo: 146. I ﬁnd in Shakespeare a far greater & more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creations are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo & his dog up to Lear & Hamlet.  147.


Sri Aurobindo: The Greeks sought universality by omitting all ﬁner individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Inﬁnite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity.   148. Shakespeare, who invented the ﬁgure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow.


Sri Aurobindo: The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula.  149. Where in material Nature wilt thou ﬁnd Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows & hints of them she possesses but they themselves tower above her.  150.


Sri Aurobindo: There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God’s touch & been drawn to it and the sceptical seeker & self-convinced atheist; but for the formularists of all the religions & the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living.  151. A man came to a scientist and wished to be instructed; this instructor showed him the revelations of the microscope & telescope, but the man laughed and said, “These are obviously hallucinations inﬂicted on the eye by the glass which you use as a medium ; I will not believe till you show these wonders to my naked seeing.” Then the scientist proved to him by many collateral facts & experiments the reliability of his knowledge but the man laughed again & said, “What you term proofs, I term coincidences, the number of coincidences does not constitute proof; as for your experiments, they are obviously effected under abnormal conditions & constitute a sort of insanity of Nature.”


Sri Aurobindo: When confronted with the results of mathematics, he was angry & cried out, “This is obviously imposture, gibberish & superstition; will you try to make me believe that these absurd cabalistic ﬁgures have any real force & meaning?” Then the scientist drove him out as a hopeless imbecile; for he did not recognise his own system of denials and his own method of negative reasoning.  If we wish to refuse an impartial & openminded enquiry, we can always ﬁnd the most respectable polysyllables to cover our refusal or impose tests & conditions which stultify the enquiry.  152. When our minds are involved in matter, they think matter the only reality; when we draw back into immaterial consciousness, then we see matter a mask and feel existence in consciousness alone as having the touch of reality.


Sri Aurobindo: Which then of these two is the truth? Nay, God knoweth; but he who has had both experiences, can easily tell which condition is the more fertile in knowledge, the mightier & more blissful.   153. I believe immaterial consciousness to be truer than material consciousness?


Sri Aurobindo: Because I know in the ﬁrst what in the second is hidden from me & also can command what the mind knows in matter.   154. Hell & Heaven exist only in the soul’s consciousness. Ay, but so does the earth and its lands & seas & ﬁelds & deserts & mountains & rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: All world is nothing but arrangement of the Soul’s seeing.  155. There is only one soul & one existence; therefore we all see one objectivity only; but there are many knots of mind & ego in the one soul-existence, therefore we all see the one Object in different lights & shadows.  156. The idealist errs; it is not Mind which created the worlds, but that which created mind has created them.


Sri Aurobindo: Mind only missees, because it sees partially & by details, what is created.  157. Thus said Ramakrishna and thus said Vivekananda. Yes, but let me know also the truths which the Avatar cast not forth into speech and the prophet has omitted from his teachings.  There will always be more in God than the thought of man has ever conceived or the tongue of man has ever uttered. 158.