Sri Aurobindo: In his universal action he is not limited by them. But into his transcendent being of which his highest universal is the image, they do not at all enter; there in the highest universal which is to us transcendent is only the absolute good of which both our good and evil have in them certain differentiated elements. Neither our good nor our evil are or can of themselves give the absolute good; both have to be transformed, evil into good, good into pure and self-existent good, before they can be taken up into it.  This explains the nature of the universe which would otherwise be inexplicable, inconsistent with the being of God, a forcefully inconscient and violently active enigma. God must be beyond limitation by our ideas of good, otherwise the universe such as it is could not exist whether as the partly manifested being of a divine Existence or a thing created or permitted by a divine Will.


Sri Aurobindo: He cannot, either, be evil, otherwise in man, his highest terrestrial creature or his highest terrestrial manifestation, there could not be this dominant idea of good and this stream of tendency towards righteousness. He cannot be a mixture of good and evil, whether a self-perplexed and struggling or a mysteriously ordered double principle, Ormuzd and Ahriman, or at least he cannot be limited by this duality, for there is much in the universe which is neither good nor evil. Perhaps the greatest part of the totality is either supramoral or inframoral or simply amoral. Good and evil come in with the development of mental consciousness; they exist in their rudimentary elements in the animal and primitive human mind, they develop with the human development. Good and evil are things which arrive in the process of the evolution; there is then the possibility that they will disappear in the process of the evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: If indeed they are essential to its highest possible point of culmination, then they will remain; or if one of them be essential and the other non-essential, then that one will remain and its opposite will disappear.  This is thy work and the aim of thy being and that for which thou art here, to become the divine superman and a perfect vessel of the Godhead. All else that thou hast to do, is only a making thyself ready or a joy by the way or a fall from thy purpose.  But the goal is this and the purpose is this and not in power of the way and the joy by the way but in the joy of the goal is the greatness and the delight of thy being. The joy of the way is because that which is drawing thee is also with thee on thy path and the power to climb was given thee that thou mightest mount to thy own summits.


Sri Aurobindo: If thou hast a duty, this is thy duty; if thou ask what shall be thy aim, let this be thy aim; if thou demand pleasure, there is no greater joy, for all other joy is broken or limited, the joy of a dream or the joy of a sleep or the joy of self-forgetting. But this is the joy of thy whole being. For if thou say what is my being, this is thy being, the Divine, and all else is only its broken or its perverse appearance. If thou seek the Truth, this is the Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: Place it before thee and in all things be faithful to it.  It has been well said by one who saw but through a veil and mistook the veil for the face, that thy aim is to become thyself; and he said well again that the nature of man is to transcend himself. This is indeed his nature and that is indeed the divine aim of his self-transcending.  What then is the self that thou hast to transcend and what is the self that thou hast to become? For it is here that thou shouldst make no error; for this error, not to know thyself, is the fountain of all thy grief and the cause of all thy stumbling.


Sri Aurobindo: That which thou hast to transcend is the self that thou appearest to be, and that is man as thou knowest him, the apparent Purusha. And what is this man? He is a mental being enslaved to life and matter; and where he is not enslaved to life and matter, he is the slave of his mind. But this is a great and heavy servitude; for to be the slave of mind is to be the slave of the false, the limited and the apparent. The self that thou hast to become, is the self that thou art within behind the veil of mind and life and matter.


Sri Aurobindo: It is to be the spiritual, the divine, the superman, the real Purusha. For that which is above the mental being, is the superman. It is to be the master of thy mind, thy life and thy body; it is to be a king over Nature of whom thou art now the tool, lifted above her who now has thee under her feet. It is to be free and not a slave, to be one and not divided, to be immortal and not obscured by death, to be full of light and not darkened, to be full of bliss and not the sport of grief and suffering, to be uplifted into power and not cast down into weakness. It is to live in the Inﬁnite and possess the ﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: It is to live in God and be one with him in his being. To become thyself is to be this and all that ﬂows from it.   Be free in thyself, and therefore free in thy mind, free in thy life and thy body. For the Spirit is freedom.


Sri Aurobindo: Be one with God and all beings; live in thyself and not in thy little ego. For the Spirit is unity.  Be thyself, immortal, and put not thy faith in death; for death is not of thyself, but of thy body. For the Spirit is immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: To be immortal is to be inﬁnite in being and consciousness and bliss; for the Spirit is inﬁnite and that which is ﬁnite lives only by his inﬁnity.  These things thou art, therefore thou canst become all this; but if thou wert not these things, then thou couldst never become them. What is within thee, that alone can be revealed in thy being. Thou appearest indeed to be other than this, but wherefore shouldst thou enslave thyself to appearances?  Rather arise, transcend thyself, become thyself.


Sri Aurobindo: Thou art man and the whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight.  Physical, he seeks for his immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the inﬁnite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.


Sri Aurobindo: To possess these is to become the superman; for [it] is to rise out of mind into the supermind. Call it the divine mind or Knowledge or the supermind; it is the power and light of the divine will and the divine consciousness. By the supermind the Spirit saw and created himself in the worlds, by that he lives in them and governs them. By that he is Swarat Samrat, self-ruler and all-ruler.  Supermind is superman; therefore to rise beyond mind is the condition.


Sri Aurobindo: To be the superman is to live the divine life, to be a god; for the gods are the powers of God. Be a power of God in humanity.  To live in the divine Being and let the consciousness and bliss, the will and knowledge of the Spirit possess thee and play with thee and through thee, this is the meaning.  This is the transﬁguration of thyself on the mountain. It is to discover God in thyself and reveal him to thyself in all things.


Sri Aurobindo: Live in his being, shine with his light, act with his power, rejoice with his bliss. Be that Fire and that Sun and that Ocean. Be that joy and that greatness and that beauty.  When thou hast done this even in part, thou hast attained to the ﬁrst steps of supermanhood.  First be sure of the call and of thy soul’s answer.


Sri Aurobindo: For if the call is not true, not the touch of God’s powers or the voice of his messengers, but the lure of thy ego, the end of thy endeavour will be a poor spiritual ﬁasco or else a deep disaster.  And if not the soul’s fervour, but only the mind’s assent or interest replies to the divine summons or only the lower life’s desire clutches at some side attraction of the fruits of Yogapower or Yoga-pleasure or only a transient emotion leaps like an unsteady ﬂame moved by the intensity of the Voice or its sweetness or grandeur, then too there can be little surety for thee in the difﬁcult path of Yoga.  The outer instruments of mortal man have no force to carry him through the severe ardours of this spiritual journey and Titanic inner battle or to meet its terrible or obstinate ordeals or nerve him to face and overcome its subtle and formidable dangers. Only his spirit’s august and steadfast will and the quenchless ﬁre of his soul’s invincible ardour are sufﬁcient for this difﬁcult transformation and this high improbable endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: Imagine not the way is easy; the way is long, arduous, dangerous, difﬁcult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen or unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance, formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast destroyed them, other thousands will surge up to take their place. Hell will vomit its hordes to oppose thee and enring and wound and menace; Heaven will meet thee with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials.


Sri Aurobindo: Thou shalt ﬁnd thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful, cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers that proﬁt by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle. There are precipitous descents, there are unending ascensions and ever higher peaks upon peaks to conquer.


Sri Aurobindo: Each plateau climbed is but a stage on the way and reveals endless heights beyond it. Each victory thou thinkest the last triumphant struggle proves to be but the prelude to a hundred ﬁerce and perilous battles... But thou sayest God’s hand will be with me and the Divine Mother near with her gracious smile of succour? And thou knowest not then that God’s grace is more difﬁcult to have or to keep than the nectar of the Immortals or Kuvera’s priceless treasures? Ask of His chosen and they will tell thee how often the Eternal has covered his face from them, how often he has withdrawn from them behind his mysterious veil and they have found themselves alone in the grip of Hell, solitary in the horror of the darkness, naked and defenceless in the anguish of the battle.


Sri Aurobindo: And if his presence is felt behind the veil, yet is it like the winter sun behind clouds and saves not from the rain and snow and the calamitous storm and the harsh wind and the bitter cold and the grey of a sorrowful atmosphere and the dun weary dullness. Doubtless the help is there even when it seems to be withdrawn, but still is there the appearance of total night with no sun to come and no star of hope to pierce the blackness. Beautiful is the face of the Divine Mother, but she too can be hard and terrible. Nay, then, is immortality a plaything to be given lightly to a child or the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling?


Sri Aurobindo: Strive rightly and thou shalt have; trust and thy trust shall in the end be justiﬁed; but the dread Law of the Way is there and none can abrogate it.  Man is a transitional being, he is not ﬁnal; for in him and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees which climb to a divine supermanhood.  The step from man towards superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring, but troubled and limited human existence — inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature’s process.  The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the ﬁrst glint of a coming divine Light, — the ﬁrst far-off intimation of a godhead to be born out of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: The appearance of the superman in the human world will be the fulﬁlment of that distant shining promise.  The difference between man and superman will be the difference between mind and a consciousness as far beyond it as thinking mind is beyond the consciousness of plant and animal;  the differentiating essence of man is mind, the differentiating essence of superman will be supermind or a divine gnosis.  Man is a mind imprisoned, obscured and circumscribed in a precarious and imperfect living but imperfectly conscious body.  The superman will be a supramental spirit which will envelop and freely use a conscious body, plastic to spiritual forces.


Sri Aurobindo: His physical frame will be a ﬁrm support and an adequate radiant instrument for the spirit’s divine play and work in Matter.  Mind, even free and in its own unmixed and unhampered element, is not the highest possibility of consciousness; for mind is not in possession of Truth, but only a minor vessel or an instrument and here an ignorant seeker plucking eagerly at a mass of falsehoods and half-truths for the unsatisfying pabulum of its hunger. Beyond mind is a supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth; all its motion and feeling and sense and outcome are instinct and luminous with the inmost reality of things and express nothing else.  Supermind or gnosis is in its original nature at once and in the same movement an inﬁnite wisdom and an inﬁnite will. At its source it is the dynamic consciousness of the divine Knower and Creator.


Sri Aurobindo: When in the process of unfolding of an always greater force of the one Existence, some delegation of this power shall descend into our limited human nature, then and then only can man exceed himself and know divinely and divinely act and create; he will have become at last a conscious portion of the Eternal. The superman will be born, not a magniﬁed mental being, but a supramental power descended here into a new life of the transformed terrestrial body. A gnostic supermanhood is the next distinct and triumphant victory to be won by the spirit descended into earthly nature.  The disk of a secret sun of Power and Joy and Knowledge is emerging out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave or a bafﬂed and impotent demiurge; supermind will be the formed body of that radiant effulgence.  Superman is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits, a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature.  Man is a being from the mental worlds whose mentality works here involved, obscure and degraded in a physical brain, shut off from its own divinest powers and impotent to change life beyond certain narrow and precarious limits. Even in the highest of his kind it is baulked of its luminous possibilities of supreme force and freedom by this dependence. Most often and in most men it is only a servitor, a purveyor of amusements, a caterer of needs and interests to the life and the body. But the superman will be a gnostic king of Nature; supermind in him even in its evolutionary beginnings will appear as a ray of the eternal omniscience and omnipotence.


Sri Aurobindo: Sovereign and irresistible it will lay hands on the mental and physical instruments, and, standing above and yet penetrating and possessing our lower already manifested parts, it will transform mind, life and body into its own divine and luminous nature.  Man in himself is hardly better than an ambitious nothing.  He is a narrowness that reaches towards ungrasped widenesses, a littleness straining towards grandeurs which are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a darkened ray in the splendours of the universal Mind. His life is a striving exulting and suffering wave, an eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dully toiling petty moment of the universal Life.


Sri Aurobindo: His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe. An immortal soul is somewhere hidden within him and gives out from time to time some sparks of its presence, and an eternal spirit is above and overshadows with its wings and upholds with its power this soul continuity in his nature. But that greater spirit is obstructed from descent by the hard lid of his constructed personality and this inner radiant soul is wrapped, stiﬂed and oppressed in dense outer coatings. In all but a few it is seldom active, in many hardly perceptible. The soul and spirit in man seem rather to exist above and behind his formed nature than to be a part of its visible reality; subliminal in his inner being or superconscient above in some unreached status, they are in his outer consciousness possibilities rather than things realised and present.


Sri Aurobindo: The spirit is in course of birth rather than born in Matter.  This imperfect being with his hampered, confused, illordered and mostly ineffective consciousness cannot be the end and highest height of the mysterious upward surge of Nature.  There is something more that has yet to be brought down from above and is now seen only by broken glimpses through sudden rifts in the giant wall of our limitations. Or else there is something yet to be evolved from below, sleeping under the veil of man’s mental consciousness or half visible by ﬂashes, as life once slept in the stone and metal, mind in the plant and reason in the cave of animal memory underlying its imperfect apparatus of emotion and sense-device and instinct. Something there is in us yet unexpressed that has to be delivered by an enveloping illumination from above.


Sri Aurobindo: A godhead is imprisoned in our depths, one in its being with a greater godhead ready to descend from superhuman summits. In that descent and awakened joining is the secret of our future.  Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is made ready by a divine Craftsman.  But he is admitted to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, unlike the lower creation, he is allowed to be partly the conscious artisan of his divine change.


Sri Aurobindo: His free assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth’s call to the supramental Creator.  If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation.  The involution of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret cause of this visible and apparent world. The keyword of the earth’s riddle is the gradual evolution of a hidden illimitable consciousness and power out of the seemingly inert yet furiously driven force of insensible Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: Earth-life is one self-chosen habitation of a great Divinity and his aeonic will is to change it from a blind prison into his splendid mansion and high heaven-reaching temple.  The nature of the Divinity in the world is an enigma to the mind, but to our enlarging consciousness it will appear as a presence simple and inevitable. Freed we shall enter into the immutable stability of an eternal existence that puts on this revealing multitude of signiﬁcant mutable forms. Illumined we shall become aware of the indivisible light of an inﬁnite consciousness that breaks out here into multiform grouping and detail of knowledge. Sublimated in might, we shall share the illimitable movement of an omnipotent force that works out its marvels in self-imposed limits.


Sri Aurobindo: Fixed in grieﬂess bliss we shall possess the calm and ecstasy of an immeasurable Delight that creates for ever the multitudinous waves and rhythms and the ever increasing outward-going and inward-drawing intensities of its own creative and communicative world-possessing and self-possessing bliss. This, since we are inwardly souls of that Spirit, will be the nature of our fourfold experience when the evolving Godhead will work here in its own unveiled movement.  If that full manifestation had been from the beginning, there would be no terrestrial problem, no anguish of growth, no bafﬂed seeking out of mind and will and life and body towards knowledge and force and joy and an immortal persistence. But this Godhead, whether within us or outside in things and forces and creatures, started from an involution in inconscience of Nature and began by the manifestation of its apparent opposites.  Out of a vast cosmic inconscience and inertia and insensibility, an initial disguise that is almost non-existence, the Spirit in Matter has chosen to evolve and slowly shape, as if in a grudging and gradually yielding material, its might and light and inﬁnity and beatitude.


Sri Aurobindo: The signiﬁcance of the terrestrial evolution lies in this slow and progressive liberation of some latent indwelling Spirit. The heart of its mystery is the difﬁcult appearance, the tardy becoming of a divine Something or Someone already involved in physical Nature. The Spirit is there with all its potential forces in a ﬁrst formal basis of its own supporting, yet resistant substance.  Its greater subsequent and deliberately emerging movements, life and mind and intuition and soul and supermind and the light of the Godhead are already there, locked up and obscurely compressed into the initial power and ﬁrst expressive values of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: Before there could be any evolution, there must needs be this involution of the Divine All that is to emerge. Otherwise there would have been not an ordered and signiﬁcant evolution, but a successive creation of things unforeseeable, not contained in their antecedents, not their inevitable consequences or right followers in sequence.  This world is not an apparent order fortuitously managed by an inexplicable Chance. Neither is it a marvellous mechanism miraculously contrived by a stumblingly fortunate unconscious Force or mechanical Necessity. It is not even a structure built according to his fancy or will by an external and therefore necessarily a limited Creator.


Sri Aurobindo: Mentally conceivable, each of these solutions can explain one side or appearance of things; but it is a greater truth that can alone successfully join all the aspects and illumine all the facts of the enigma.  If all were indeed a result of cosmic Chance, there would be no necessity of a new advance; nothing beyond mind need appear in the material world, — as indeed there was then no necessity for even mind to arise at all out of the meaningless blind material whirl. Consciousness itself would be only a fortuitous apparition, a strange hallucinating reﬂection or ghost of Matter.  Or if all were the work of a mechanical Force, then too mind need not have appeared at all as part of the huge grinding engine; there was no indispensable call for this subtler and yet less competent groping mechanic contrivance. No frail thinking brain should have been there to labour over the quite sufﬁcient cogs and springs and pistons of the ﬁrst unerring machine.


Sri Aurobindo: A supermind added on this brilliant and painful complication would be still more a superﬂuity and a luminous insolence; it could be nothing more than a false pretension of transitory consciousness to govern and possess the greater inconscient Force that is its creator.  Or if an experimenting, external and therefore limited Creator were the inventor of the animal’s suffering life and man’s fumbling mind and this huge mainly unused and useless universe, there was no reason why he should not have stopped short with the construction of a mental intelligence in his creatures, content with the difﬁcult ingenuity of his labour. Even if he were all-powerful and all-wise, he might well pause there, — for if he went farther, the creature would be in danger of rising too near to the level of his Maker.  But if this is the truth of things that an inﬁnite Spirit, an eternal Divine Presence and Consciousness and Force and Bliss is involved and hidden here and slowly emerges, then is it inevitable that its powers or the ascending degrees of its one power should emerge too one after the other till the whole glory is manifested, a mighty divine Fact embodied and dynamic and visible.  All mental ideas of the nature of things, are inconclusive considerations of our insufﬁcient logical reason when it attempts in its limited light and ignorant self-sufﬁciency to weigh the logical probabilities of a universal order which after all its speculation and discovery must remain obscure to it still and an enigma.


Sri Aurobindo: The true witness and discoverer is our growing consciousness; for that consciousness is itself the sign and power of the evolving Divine, and its growth out of the apparent inconscience of the material universe is the fundamental, the one abiding, progressive index event of the long earth-story.  Only when this evolving consciousness can grow into its own full divine power will we directly know ourselves and the world instead of catching at tags and tail ends of an insufﬁcient ﬁgure of knowledge. This full power of the consciousness is supermind or gnosis, — supermind because to reach it we have to pass beyond and turn upon mind as the mind itself has passed and turned upon life and inconscient matter and gnosis because it is eternally self-possessed of Truth and in its very stuff and nature it is dynamic substance of knowledge.  The true knowledge of things is denied to our reason, because that is not our spirit’s greatest essential power but only an expedient, a transitional instrument meant to deal with the appearance of things and their phenomenal process. True knowledge commences only when our consciousness can pass beyond its present normal limit in man: for then it becomes directly aware of its self and of the Power in the world and begins to have at least an initial knowledge by identity which is the sole true knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Henceforward it knows and sees, no longer by the reason groping among external data, but by an ever increasing and always more luminous self-illumining and all illuminating experience. In the end it will become a conscious part of the Divine revealing itself in the world; its life will be a power for the conscious evolution of that which is still unmanifested in the material universe.  All life here is a stage or a circumstance in an unfolding progressive evolution of a Spirit that has involved itself in Matter and is labouring to manifest itself in that reluctant substance. This is the whole secret of earthly existence.  But the key of that secret is not to be found in life itself or in the body; its hieroglyph is not in embryo or organism, — for these are only a physical means or base: the one signiﬁcant mystery of this universe is the appearance and growth of consciousness in the vast mute unintelligence of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: The escape of Consciousness out of an apparent initial Inconscience, — but it was there all the time masked and latent, for the inconscience of Matter is itself only a hooded consciousness — its struggle to ﬁnd itself, its reaching out to its own inherent completeness, perfection, joy, light, strength, mastery, harmony, freedom, this is the prolonged miracle and yet the natural and all-explaining phenomenon of which we are at once the observers and a part, instrument and vehicle.  A Consciousness, a Being, a Power, a Joy was here from the beginning darkly imprisoned in this apparent denial of itself, this original night, this obscurity and nescience of material Nature.  That which is and was for ever, free, perfect, eternal and inﬁnite, That which all is, That which we call God, Brahman, Spirit, has here shut itself up in its own self-created opposite. The Omniscient has plunged itself into Nescience, the All-Conscious into Inconscience, the All-Wise into perpetual Ignorance. The Omnipotent has formulated itself in a vast cosmic self-driven Inertia that by disintegration creates; the Inﬁnite is self-expressed here in a boundless fragmentation; the All-Blissful has put on a huge insensibility out of which it struggles by pain and hunger and desire and sorrow.


Sri Aurobindo: Elsewhere the Divine is; here in physical life, in this obscure material world, it would seem almost as if the Divine Divine is not but is only becoming, .  This gradual becoming of the Divine out of its own phenomenal opposites is the meaning and purpose of the terrestrial evolution.  Evolution in its essence is not the development of a more and more organised body or a more and more efﬁcient life — these are only its machinery and outward circumstance. Evolution is the strife of a Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake and be free and ﬁnd and possess itself and all its possibilities to the very utmost and widest, to the very last and highest.  Evolution is the emancipation of a self-revealing Soul secret in Form and Force, the slow becoming of a Godhead, the growth of a Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: In this evolution mental man is not the goal and end, the completing value, the highest last signiﬁcance; he is too small and imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. Man is not ﬁnal, but a middle term only, a transitional being, an instrumental intermediate creature.  This character of evolution and this mediary position of man are not at ﬁrst apparent; for to the outward eye it would seem as if evolution, the physical evolution at least were ﬁnished long ago leaving man behind as its poor best result and no new beings or superior creations were to be expected any longer.  But this appears to us only so long as we look at forms and outsides only and not at the inner signiﬁcances of the whole process. Matter, body, life even are the ﬁrst terms necessary for the work that had to be done.


Sri Aurobindo: New living forms may no longer be appearing freely, but this is because it is not, or at least it is not primarily, new living forms that the Force of evolution is now busied with evolving, but new powers of consciousness.  When Nature, the Divine Power, had formed a body erect and empowered to think, to devise, to inquire into itself and things and work consciously both on things and self, she had what she wanted for her secret aim; relegating all else to the sphere of secondary movements, she turned toward that long-hidden aim her main highest forces. For all till then was a long strenuously slow preparation; but throughout it the development of consciousness in which the appearance of man was the crucial turning point had been kept wrapped within her as her ultimate business and true purpose.  This slow preparation of Nature covered immense aeons of time and inﬁnities of space in which they appeared to be her only business; the real business strikes on our view at least when we look with the outward eye of reason as if it came only as a fortuitous accident, in or near the end, for a span of time and in a speck and hardly noticeable corner of one of the smallest provinces of a possibly minor universe among these many boundless ﬁnites, these countless universes. If it were so, we could still reply that time and space matter not to the Inﬁnite and Eternal; it is not a waste of labour for That — as it would be for our brief death-driven existences — to work for trillions of years in order to ﬂower only for a moment.


Sri Aurobindo: But that paradox too is only an appearance — for the history of this single earth is not all the story of evolution — other earths there are even now elsewhere, and even here many earth-cycles came before us, and many are those that will come hereafter.  Nature laboured for innumerable millions of years to create a material universe of ﬂaming suns and systems; for a lesser but still interminable series of millions she stooped to make this earth a habitable planet. For all that incalculable time she was or seemed busy only with the evolution of Matter; life and mind were kept secret in an apparent non-existence. But the time came when life could manifest, a vibration in the metal, a growing and seeking, a drawing in and a feeling outward in the plant, an instinctive force and sense, a nexus of joy and pain and hunger and emotion and fear and struggle in the animal, — a ﬁrst organised consciousness, the beginning of the long-planned miracle. Thenceforward she was busy no more exclusively with matter for its own sake, but most with palpitant plasmic matter useful for the expression of life; the evolution of life was now her one intent purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: And slowly too mind manifested in life, an intensely feeling, a crude thinking and planning vital mind in the animal, but in man the full organisation and apparatus, the developing if yet imperfect mental being, the Manu, the thinking, devising, aspiring, already self-conscient creature. And from that time onward the growth of mind rather than any radical change of life became her shining preoccupation, her wonderful wager. Body appeared to evolve no more; life itself evolved little or only so much in its cycles as would serve to express Mind heightening and widening itself in the living body; an unseen internal evolution was now Nature’s great passion and purpose.  And if Mind were all that consciousness could achieve, if Mind were the secret Godhead, if there were nothing higher, larger, [no] more miraculous ranges, man could be left to fulﬁl mind and complete his own being and there would or need be nothing here beyond him, carrying consciousness to its summits, extending it to its unwalled vastnesses, plunging with it into depths unfathomable; he would by perfecting himself consummate Nature. Evolution would end in a Man-God, crown of the earthly cycles.


Sri Aurobindo: But Mind is not all; for beyond mind is a greater consciousness; there is a supermind and spirit. As Nature laboured in the animal, the vital being, till she could manifest out of him man, the Manu, the thinker, so she is labouring in man, the mental being till she can manifest out of him a spiritual and supramental godhead, the truth conscious Seer, the knower by identity, the embodied Transcendental and Universal in the individual nature.  From the clod and metal to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man, so much has she completed of her journey; a huge stretch or a stupendous leap still remains before her. As from matter to life, from life to mind, so now she must pass from mind to supermind, from man to superman; this is the gulf that she has to bridge, the supreme miracle that she has to perform before she can rest from her struggle and discontent and stand in the radiance of that supreme consciousness, gloriﬁed, transmuted, satisﬁed with her labour.  The subhuman was once here supreme in her, the human replacing it walks now in the front of Time, but still, aim and goal of the future there waits the supramental, the superman, an unborn glory yet unachieved before her.


Sri Aurobindo: The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent towards God and a descent of Godhead into the embodied nature.  The ascent can only be achieved by a one-centred allgathering upward aspiration of the soul and mind and life and body; the descent can only come by a call of the whole being towards the inﬁnite and eternal Divine. If this call and this aspiration are there, or if by any means they can be born and grow constantly and seize all the nature, then and then only a supramental uplifting and transformation becomes possible.  The call and the aspiration are only ﬁrst conditions; there must be along with them and brought by their effective intensity an opening of all the being to the Divine and a total surre


Sri Aurobindo: nder.  This opening is a throwing wide of all the nature on all its levels and in all its parts to receive into itself without limits the greater divine Consciousness which is there already above and behind and englobing this mortal half-conscious existence. In the receiving there must be no inability to contain, no breaking down of anything in the system, mind or life or nerve or body under the transmuting stress. There must be an endless receptivity, an always increasing capacity to bear an ever stronger and more and more insistent action of the divine Force. Otherwise nothing great and permanent can be done; the Yoga will end in a break-down or an inert stoppage or a stultifying or a disastrous arrest in a process which must be absolute and integral if it is not [to] be a failure.


Sri Aurobindo: But since no human system has this endless receptivity and unfailing capacity, the supramental Yoga can succeed only if the Divine Force as it descends increases the personal power and equates the strength that receives with the Force that enters from above to work in the nature. This is only possible if there is on our part a progressive surrender of the being into the hands of the Divine; there must be a complete and never failing assent, a courageous willingness to let the Divine Power do with us whatever is needed for the work that has to be done.  Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle.  For the powers of our mind, life and body are bound to their own limitations and, however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise above their natural ultimate limits or expand beyond them.


Sri Aurobindo: But, still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a supramental Light, Truth and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance.  If the supramental Power is allowed by man’s discerning assent and vigilant surrender to act according to its own profound and subtle insight and ﬂexible potency, it will bring about slowly or swiftly a divine transformation of our present semiperfect nature.  This descent, this working is not without its possibility of calamitous fall and danger. If the human mind or the vital desire seizes hold on the descending force and tries to use it according to its own limited and erring ideas or ﬂawed and egoistic impulses, — and this is inevitable in some degree until this lower mortal has learned something of the way of that greater immortal nature, — stumblings and deviations, hard and seemingly insuperable obstacles and wounds and suffering cannot be escaped and even death or utter downfall are not impossible.


Sri Aurobindo: Only when the conscious integral surrender to the Divine has been learned by mind and life and body, can the way of the Yoga become easy, straight, swift and safe.  And it must be a surrender and an opening to the Divine alone and to no other. For it is possible for an obscure mind or an impure life force in us to surrender to undivine and hostile forces and even to mistake them for the Divine. There can be no more calamitous error. Therefore our surrender must be no blind and inert passivity to all inﬂuences or any inﬂuence, but sincere, conscious, vigilant, pointed to the One and the Highest alone.


Sri Aurobindo: Self-surrender to the divine and inﬁnite Mother, however difﬁcult, remains our only effective means and our sole abiding refuge. Self-surrender to her means that our nature must be an instrument in her hands, the soul a child in the arms of the Mother.  1  There are three Powers with whom we have to reckon, three and no others; for no others are in the universe or out of the universe: God, the Soul and Nature. And these three are, as it were, different fronts of One Being.


Sri Aurobindo: 2  All existence, whatever its appearance or its process of being, is and draws its substance, origin, energy, truth from a Spirit which is the beginning, middle and end of all — itself being eternal, inﬁnite, self-existent beyond end or beginning, beyond Space and Time, beyond Form and Quality and Circumstance as well as in Space and Time, in Form and Quality and Circumstance. This is the fundamental Reality which is hidden from our knowledge, the one Truth on which all other truths depend, those that afﬁrm it as well as those that seem to contradict it. To be conscious of this Reality and its right relations with the other truths or appearances of existence, to live in it and govern by its Truth all our being, consciousness, nature, will, action would then be the law of a perfect life. If human life is imperfect, it is because its consciousness moves seeking, groping, experimenting in a fundamental ignorance of the real truth of its own being and is therefore unable to know or to effectuate the true law of its life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only if man can overcome this ignorance and inability that he can hope to perfect his life and nature. If there is no means of doing that, then he can never hope to escape from his imperfection — and the suffering which is its consequence. He can only either die in his ignorance escaping from an incurable imperfection and suffering by a physical extinction or escape out of it by a spiritual extinction gained through an awakening of the soul to the illusoriness of birth and world and Nature or [ . . . ] & hope to get [out] of it into some other supraterrestrial state of existence. Human life on earth can then never grow into anything fundamentally other, better or more perfect than it is now. The hope that by using our reason and observing or utilising the laws of Nature we can arrive at a perfect life here is futile, for our nature here being itself ignorant and imperfect cannot arrive at anything better than a mitigated imperfection and ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: But if there is a means by which we can arrive at a true knowledge of the reality behind things and enter into its Truth and Light and Power then there is no reason why our life here should not become divine and perfect. It is through Yoga that this means can be found and this emergence become possible.  3  A greater existence and consciousness than what we are now or are in our surface being, to which yet we can by certain means raise ourself and become or enter into that, — this is the postulate of all Yoga.  What is this greater consciousness and existence?


Sri Aurobindo: It is something or someone eternal and inﬁnite, absolute or perfect, in which all is, from which all comes, to which all returns and which is the secret self of all things. All is by its existence, all is conscious by its consciousness, continues to be by its Ananda of being, thinks by its Mind, lives by its life, is a form of its Energy in the Cosmos. But still the existence we live, the consciousness we use, the highest joy of being which we experience, our mind, life, body, force are but a fragmentary phenomenon of or in It. That Eternal is the All, the whole, our greater Self, our completeness, our universe, yet is it more than any universe. If no universe were, it still would be.


Sri Aurobindo: This Eternal and Inﬁnite is not only an Eternal of endless Time and Space. For its eternity can be realised not only in the endless progression of the years and aeons but in a single moment of Time, its inﬁnity not only in the boundless extension of space to which we can assign no end or border, but in the most inﬁnitesimal atom of an atom. But beyond the moment and the endless aeons the eternity of the Eternal is timeless and beyond the spatial Inﬁnite and Inﬁnitesimal the inﬁnity of the Inﬁnite is spaceless.  4  All begins from the Divine, from the Eternal, from the Inﬁnite, all abides in it alone and by it alone, all ends or culminates in the divine Eternal and Inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the ﬁrst postulate indispensable for our spiritual seeking — for on no other base can we found the highest knowledge and the highest life.  All time moves in the Eternal; all space is spread in the Inﬁnite; all creatures and creations live by that in them which is Divine. This is patently true of an inner spiritual but also proves in the end to be true of this outer space and time. It is known to our inmost being that it lives because it is part of the Divine, but it is true also of the external and phenomenal creature compounded of ignorant Mind, blind life and subconscious Matter.  A secret Self is the Alpha and Omega of this manifested existence; it is also the constant term, the omnipresent x into which all things resolve separately or together and which is their sum, their constituting material and their essence.


Sri Aurobindo: All here is secretly the Divine, all is the Eternal, all is the Inﬁnite.  But this secret truth of things is contradicted by the world’s external appearances, it is denied by all the facts placed before us by our mind and senses, inconsistent with the sorrow and suffering of the world, incompatible with the imperfection of living beings and the unchangeable inconscience of things. What then pushes the mind to afﬁrm it? what compels us to admit a seeing of things which is in conﬂict with our outer seeing and experience?  For on the surface of our consciousness and all around us there is only the temporal and transient, only [the] conﬁned and ﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: What seems largest to us ﬁnds its limit, what we dreamed to be enduring comes to an end; even this vast universe with its masses of worlds upon worlds which seemed to stretch into inﬁnity is convicted in the end of being only a boundless ﬁnite.  Man claiming to be a divine soul and an all-discovering intellect is brought up short by Nature’s rude proof of his ignorance and incompetence and exhibits constantly in his thoughts the proneness to self-conﬁdent error and in his feelings and acts the petty faultiness, meanness, and darkness or suddenly the abysses of falsehood or foulness or cruelty of his nature. In the management of his world the much that is undivine prevails easily over the little that is divine or they are inextricably mixed together. The ideal fails in practice, religion degenerates quickly into a settled sectarian fanaticism or formality, the triumphant good turns into an organised evil. The Christian doctrine of the fall, the Indian idea of the wandering of the Soul in a cosmic illusion or the sceptic afﬁrmation of an inconscient material Nature producing the freak of consciousness seems often to be the kernel of the whole matter.


Sri Aurobindo: And yet if we go deep enough into ourselves, we strike against something valid that proves to be a veiled divine element which afﬁrms its immortality, Soul. If we go beyond our embodied mind and senses we break suddenly into something permanent that feels itself to be eternal and inﬁnite, that cannot see itself as anything else and we also cannot conceive of it as anything else, an inﬁnite Self, an eternal Spirit. Moreover in our most secret essence we are convinced of perfection or of perfectibility — perfection in our deepest spiritual being, perfectibility in our nature; we have the instinct and intuition of the Divine.  Even to Time and Space our mind cannot ﬁx or conceive a beginning or an end; it cannot conceive a ﬁrst bound or a last, a primary or ultimate moment without at once looking beyond it. If we see the imperfection of things, the very idea implies a potentiality of a perfection by comparison with which they are imperfect, and this potentiality points to a beyond Mind and beyond Sense which is the integrally and permanently perfect.


Sri Aurobindo: Every relative supposes an absolute.  For a long time we have been asked not to believe in these things, to put our trust only in the measuring rods of science and its calculations and crucibles, to accept only what is materially ascertainable and measurable. But these measurements are those of something that is limited — how can we ascertain by it whether there is or is not the Illimitable? The instruments by which we question Nature in order to ﬁnd out what is ascertainable have been proved to give only the results which are already contained in the question or in the questioner.  Science gives us the measures and process of things within the physical limit, but it has failed [to] tell us what things are, their ﬁnal origin or their reason of existence.


Sri Aurobindo: In all this questing by one end or the other we cannot get beyond ourselves and it is better then to look into the inner side of ourselves, — why should we limit ourselves only to our responses to an outer evidence? Let us explore ourselves and not only our sense or perception of what is around us. And in ourselves let us look not only at our surfaces but at the inner and the inmost of our being and nature.  This self-knowledge pursued far enough shows us a deeper than the surface mind and a deeper than the physical sense, a profounder than the outward life. It shows us also a BeyondMind and Beyond-Sense, a Beyond-Life; the limited passes into [the] illimitable.


Sri Aurobindo: If there were not this capacity of research, we would have to be content with an unsatisﬁed agnosticism; but the means is there by which we can know ourselves and this Alpha and X and Omega of things or if not absolutely It at any rate its status and its dynamis, the law of its being and the law of its nature quite as deeply and more deeply than Science can show us the law and process of the physical universe.  For the moment let us afﬁrm only this result that this spiritual search and knowledge leads us beyond the phenomenon which apparently contradicts it to that which beyond the phenomenon brings us to the Divine Eternal and Inﬁnite.  5  The rooted and fundamental conception of Vedanta is that there exists somewhere, could we but ﬁnd it, available to experience or self-revelation, if denied to intellectual research, a single truth comprehensive & universal in the light of which the whole of existence would stand revealed and explained both in its nature and its end. This universal existence, for all its multitude of objects and its diversity of faces, is one in substance and origin; and there is an unknown quantity, X or Brahman to which it can be reduced, for from that it started and in & by that it still exists.


Sri Aurobindo: 6  Brahman is that which was before the beginning and will be after the end of things. In the beginning, says the Upanishad, Self was, Being was or Non-Being was; that saw world-creation in itself or from that Non-Being or eternal Being temporal existence was born. What prevents the timeless Eternal from conceiving Time in himself and ceasing from the conception? But the very idea supposes time[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 7  One says “In the beginning was the Self, the Spirit, God, the Eternal.” But there was never a beginning, for the Eternal and its works are always and for ever.  “In the beginning” is a phrase that has no meaning unless we speak of sections of existence, sections of it in Time, sections of it in Space, sections of it in substance; for these have a beginning and an end.


Sri Aurobindo: Existence in itself has no end even as it never had a beginning.  It is not of pure existence only that this [can be said], existence in its essence without any expressive motion or feature, but of existence with all it contains and reveals in its depths as on its surface. For pure existence is only a state of being and not being in its whole truth and integral signiﬁcance.  And even this state, although it appears to the quiescent mind featureless, motionless, concentrated in bare uniqueness, is still not empty or without feature, — it contains enveloped in itself all truth of feature, all power of motion, all that ever was, is or shall be manifested in this or any universe.  But the supreme divine Being is beyond any distinction of pure existence and phenomenal existence, feature or no feature, form or no form, being or non-being, manifestation and the unmanifest — for these are distinctions, separate states, opposite ideas to the mind, separate experiences to the Soul on the mental level,.


Sri Aurobindo: But the Supreme is beyond Mind and has no need for these divisions and contradictions of its nature.  8  All existence is existence of the one Eternal and Inﬁnite.  Ekamevadvitiyam, — there is one without a second and there can be nothing else at any time or anywhere.  Even existence in Time is that, even the ﬁnite is that; for the ﬁnite is only a circumstance of the Inﬁnite and Time is only a phase of Eternity.


Sri Aurobindo: What we call undivine is that, for it is only a disguise of the omnipresent Divinity.  9  All existence is the existence of the one Divine Eternal and Inﬁnite, there is and can be nothing else; not only the inﬁnite is that but the ﬁnite, not only the timeless but Time and all that is in Time, not only the Impersonal but the Person, quality and number and that which [is] beyond quality and number; the Formless and form, the individual no less than the cosmic and supracosmic, matter and life and mind as well as the spirit, the relative and the absolute. All is that:.  All that is is reality of the Real; there is no need to invent an eternal illusive principle of Maya to account for world existence.


Sri Aurobindo: The idea that the Supreme Reality is incapable of selfmanifestation and that its only power is a power of self-delusion is a last desperate refuge of the human Mind and Reason trying to escape from a difﬁculty which is of its own creation, its own self-imposed illusion or Maya and does not exist for the true and perfect supramental consciousness of the luminous Spirit.  There is no incompatibility between the Eternal and existence in Time. Time and the Timeless are the same Eternity in a self-contained status and a self-developing movement. The Timeless is eternal and knows itself in an everlasting present; Time too is eternal and is known in an indivisible movement of past, present and future. It is our consciousness poising itself in the mobile moment that gives us the impression of a divided Time, of consciousness moving from moment to moment, losing its past, gaining its future, connecting the three only by an act of memory which binds the is to the was and the to be.


Sri Aurobindo: In the eternal Consciousness the past still exists and extends through the present into the future. To suppose that the Timeless is debarred by its timelessness from throwing itself out in a movement of Time and that Time therefore and all in time is an illusion or to suppose that Time alone exists and we are its temporal creations is to impose the ignorance and limitation of our little surface consciousness on the Divine Eternal. In reality we ourselves below our surface are the timeless developing in movement our existence in eternal Time.  10  One sole Reality constitutes all the inﬁnite, the One, the Divine, the Eternal and Inﬁnite — there is That alone and no other existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Ekamevadvitiyam.  Inﬁnite, but the ﬁnite existence is also that one being, that inﬁnite Being; it has no separate reality: Eternal, but the temporal is nothing more than a movement of that Eternity, Time has no independent self-sustenance: Divine, but all that seems undivine is a disguise of the Divinity, it is no creation out of some unaccountable Opposite.  The Divine Reality is unconﬁned by form or quality; but form and quality also are his, inﬁnite quality, innumerable ﬁgure, vessel of that earth, coin of that gold, colour inherent in that transcendent whiteness.


Sri Aurobindo: All is the divine Eternal and Inﬁnite.  Impersonal and Personal are not contrary appearances or even dual aspects nor is the Person our convenient imagination of an ever impersonal Entity, but rather both are for ever the One.  All is the Divine, even that which is undivine. There is no not self; all this is the eternal Self; all this universe and every other universe is the Time existence of the timeless Spirit.  11


Sri Aurobindo: There is one sole reality and there can be no other, the One, the Divine, the Eternal and Inﬁnite..  The One is at the same time the All, for it exists in all, all exists by it, it all. Whatever be [the] plane of being, whatever be the cosmos, whatever be the individual, the truth of its existence is the same; that it or he is the One; for there is and can be no other. The Transcendent is the Divine, the universal is the Divine, the individual is the Divine; all are the one Reality.  Not only what we see as the Inﬁnite, but the ﬁnite also is that One Existence; it has no separate and independent reality.


Sri Aurobindo: Not only the Eternal [is] that, but the temporal also, for the temporal is only a circumstance of the Eternal apart from which Time has no self-existence. Not only what we see as Divine is that, but the undivine is no more than a disguise of the one Divinity, it is no creation out of an unaccountable Opposite.   12  All existence is one; it is existence of the One Being, divine, inﬁnite, eternal, absolute.


Sri Aurobindo: What we see as the Many, is the multiplicity of the One. All these apparently separate persons and objects are also the one existence; they are beings of the One Being. For That is their one self; in their spiritual essence they are That, even in the play and form of their being they are That; they are personalities of the one Person, they are manifestations of the one Existence, they are so many realities of the only Real. In no way are they separate and independent from It, but in every way live by It, are of It, can be nothing else. All forces are powers of the one Force, the sole Power of the One Being; there is no other force than his.


Sri Aurobindo: All objects are formations of the one Existence; there is nothing that exists in itself and apart from That, nothing that is of an individual essence other than the one Essence of the universe.  What we see as ﬁnite is not other than the Inﬁnite. All is in the Inﬁnite, all exists by the Inﬁnite, all is of the stuff of the Inﬁnite. No object or person could come into being or remain in being by its own ﬁnite and individual power; none exists by its own limited substance and essence other than the substance and essence of all others; all are at bottom indissolubly one. There is effective determination, deﬁnition, demarcation, diverse formation in the universe but no essential separation or division.


Sri Aurobindo: A tree is separate as an object or phenomenon, but it is not a separate existence divided from all around it; there is a one-existence and a one-energy that has taken form of tree, constitutes every atom, molecule, ﬁbre of it, pervades and is its whole structure of being and this existence, this energy not only abides in all of it and ﬂows through all of it but extends everywhere around and is, constitutes, energises all other objects in the cosmos. Each ﬁnite is in fact the Inﬁnite; all apparently separate or divided existence is only a front of the Indivisible.   All that we see as temporal is not other than the Eternal.  The form of that which is in Time is or appears to be evanescent, but the self, the substance, the being that takes shape in that form is eternal and is one self, one substance, one being with all that is, all that was, all that shall be.


Sri Aurobindo: But even the form is in itself eternal and not temporal, but it exists for ever in possibility, in power, in consciousness in the Eternal. Form is manifested and withdrawn from manifestation; it may be manifested by immediate apparition or it may be manifested by construction and withdrawn from manifestation by destruction or disaggregation, but in either case it exists beforehand in the consciousness and being of the Eternal. If it did not so preexist in power and possibility, it could not be created in actuality. For the actual proceeds from the possible and the possible is always a possibility of the truth of the Eternal.  13


Sri Aurobindo: All existence of whatever nature is existence of the One Divine, the Eternal and Inﬁnite.  For not only the Inﬁnite is that existence, but the ﬁnite also; not only the existence of the One, but the existence of the Many, not only the existence of the Unmanifest, but the existence of the manifested universe and of all actual or possible universes, not only the Impersonal, but the Personal, not only the Pure Existence, Consciousness, Bliss of Sachchidananda but all forms of existence or consciousness blissful or unblissful, not only the existence of the Absolute but the existence of all that is relative.  There is nothing that is not the existence of the One Divine, the Eternal and Inﬁnite..  14  There is one Being, inﬁnite, eternal and divine, the sole Reality.


Sri Aurobindo: All is the [ ], there is nothing else in the universe or outside the universe..  This eternity is not of Time; the eternity of Time is an extension in movement of the Timeless.  This inﬁnity is not of Space; the inﬁnity of Space is an extension in self of this spaceless Inﬁnite.  15  All existence is the existence of the Eternal, the Inﬁnite, the Divine, the Ineffable — existence in Time no less than existence in Eternity, existence in the ﬁnite no less than existence in the Inﬁnite, of the Many no less than of the One, of the Personal no less than of the Impersonal, of the individual and the cosmos no less than of the supercosmic, of the relative no less than of the Absolute..


Sri Aurobindo: The Eternal is in his very truth of being Existence, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. These three are a trinity and inseparable — they are not three but one; it is only in a certain play of the Manifestation that they can be distinguished and separated from each other or turned phenomenally into their opposites. What appears to us as Nonexistence (Asat, Nihil or Sunya) is only an existence other than the existence of which we are aware. What appears to us as Inconscience is only a veiled or involved consciousness or else a consciousness to which our mind or sense has no access.


Sri Aurobindo: What affects us as pain or suffering is only Ananda turned against itself, a distorted and tortured Bliss of existence. These contradictions are real in the Ignorance and because of the Ignorance, but to the true consciousness they are only phenomenal and superﬁcial, not true truths of being.   16  Nothing can arise from Nothing.


Sri Aurobindo: Asat, nothingness, is a creation of our mind; where it cannot see or conceive, where its object is something beyond its grasp, too much beyond to give even the sense of a vague intangible, then it cries out “Here there is nothing.” Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a Zero. But what in truth is this zero? It is an incalculable Inﬁnite.  Our sense by its incapacity has invented darkness.


Sri Aurobindo: In truth there is nothing but Light, only it is a power of light either above or below our poor human vision’s limited range.  For do not imagine that light is created by the Suns. The Suns are only physical concentrations of Light, but the splendour they concentrate for us is self-born and everywhere.  God is everywhere and wherever God is, there is Light.  Jnanam chaitanyam jyotir Brahma.


Sri Aurobindo:   Of all that we know we know only the outside; even when we imagine that we have intimately seized the innermost thing, we have touched only an inner external. It is still a sheath of the covering, only it is a second or third or even a seventh sheath, not the most outward and visible.  It is the same when we think we know God or have possession of our highest inmost Self or have entered intimately into the inmost and supreme Spirit. What we know and possess is power or some powers of God, an aspect or appearance or formulation of the Self; what we have entered into is only one wideness or one depth of the Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: This is because we know and possess by the mind or even what is below the mind, and when we ﬁnd ourselves most spiritual, it is the mind spiritualised that conceives of itself as spirit. Imagining that we have left mind behind us, we take it with us into its own spiritual realms and cover with it the Supramental Mystery. The result is something to us wonderful and intense; but compared with That Intensity and Wonder, it is something thin and inadequate.  17  All existence, — as the mind and sense know existence, — is manifestation of an Eternal and Inﬁnite which is to the mind and sense unknowable but not unknowable to its own self-awareness.


Sri Aurobindo: Whatever the manifestation spiritual or material or other may be, it has behind it something that is beyond itself, and even if we reached the highest possible heights of manifested existence there would be still beyond that even an Unmanifested from which it came.  The Unmanifested Supreme is beyond all deﬁnition and description by mind or speech; no deﬁnition the mind can make, afﬁrmative or negative, can be at all expressive of it or adequate.  To the Mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunya), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of Silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind’s approach to it, not That itself; impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not the true essence or nature (swarupa) of the Eternal and Inﬁnite. Even the words Eternal and Inﬁnite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.


Sri Aurobindo: If we say of it neti neti, this can mean nothing except that nothing in the world or beyond it of which the mind can take cognisance is the Supreme in Its entirety or Its essence. If we say of it iti iti, this can mean at the most that what we see of it in the world or beyond is some indication of something that is there beyond and by travelling through all these indications to their absolutes we may get a step or two nearer to the Absolute of all absolutes, the Supreme. Both formulas have a truth in them, but neither touches the secret truth of the Supreme.  18  The Origin and eternal Supporter of all existence, as of all that seems to ignorant Mind to be non-existence, is a supreme inﬁnite and absolute.


Sri Aurobindo: This Inﬁnite is an essential, not, except in manifestation, a mobile temporal or extended spatial inﬁnite;  this Absolute is an expressibly positive, not a merely negating absolute — not excluding, but containing all relatives; for in it they ﬁnd their own eternal and stable truth behind their present temporary and ﬂuctuating appearance.  The Supreme is knowable to itself but unknowable to mind, inexpressible by words, because mind can grasp and words coined by the mind can express only limited, relative and divided things. Mind gets only misleading inadequate indeﬁnite impressions or too deﬁnite reﬂective ideas of things too much beyond itself. Even here in its own ﬁeld it grasps not things in themselves, but processes and phenomena, signiﬁcant aspects, constructions and ﬁgures.


Sri Aurobindo: But the Supreme is to its own absolute consciousness for ever self-known and self-aware, as also to supramental gnosis it is intimately known and knowable.  This Inﬁnite and Eternal is the supreme Self of all, the supreme Source, Spirit and Person of all, the supreme Lord of all; there is nothing beyond it, nothing outside it. A million universes for ever persist or for ever recur because they are substantial expressions and manifestations of the supreme Inﬁnite and Eternal.   19


Sri Aurobindo: All is existence. Non-existence is a ﬁction of the mind; for we describe as non-existent all that has never been within the range of our limited consciousness or is not in that range at the moment or was there once but has gone beyond it.  20  Being is not Parabrahman nor is Non-Being Parabrahman; these are only afﬁrmative & negative terms in which Consciousness envisages its self-existence.  Parabrahman is beyond Knowledge because Knowledge cannot comprehend that which comprehends it & is anterior to itself.


Sri Aurobindo: The beginning of Wisdom is to renounce the attempt to know the Unknowable.  Nevertheless vast shadows of the Unknowable are reﬂected in Knowledge & to these inﬁnities we give names, the Absolute, the Relative, Being, Non-Being, Consciousness, Force, Bliss, God, Self, the Personal, the Impersonal, Krishna, Shiva, Brahman.  Each thing in the universe is All in the Universe and also That which is beyond the universe, — what Knowledge sees of it is only the face that the All presents in some play of Its inﬁnite consciousness. We are our own Knowledge & all that is unknown to our Knowledge.  What matters in the universe is the play of the All in Itself & its ultimate self-fulﬁlment in Knowledge, Bliss & Being.


Sri Aurobindo: There is an individual self-fulﬁlment, a collective, a cosmic & an extra-cosmic. We may move towards any of these ultimate afﬁrmations, but he who accepts them all & harmonises them, is the highest human expression of Parabrahman. He is the Avatar or the divine Unit.  21  All being is the Eternal, the Inﬁnite, the Divine; there is nothing beyond the Eternal and Inﬁnite, neither is there anything else anywhere whether in existence or in non-existence.


Sri Aurobindo: All being ranges between the Manifestation and the NonManifestation. These are the two poles of the Inﬁnite.   The Non-Manifestation is not a Non-Existence. NonExistence is a term created by the mind and has no absolute signiﬁcance; there is no such thing as an absolute Nihil or Zero.


Sri Aurobindo: It is agreed even by the philosophies of the Nihil, Tao or Zero (Sunya) that the Non-Existence of which they speak is a Nought in which all is and from which all comes. Tao, Nihil or Zero is not different from the Absolute or the Supreme Brahman of Vedanta; it is only another way of describing or naming it. The Supreme is an Existence beyond what we know of our existence and therefore only it can seem to our mind as a Zero, a Nihil, a Non-Existence. There is nothing there of what we know as existence, for though all is in Tao, yet all is there in a way of which our mind can have no conception or experience, therefore to the mind it has no reality and brings no concept of existence.  The manifestation in the Ignorance, that in which we live, has also been described as Asat, a non-existence,


Sri Aurobindo: because it is not real, eternal, inﬁnite, divine; it must therefore be an illusion, since only That exists and nothing else. But even Illusionism agrees that the manifested world is not without reality, — it is practically real, but not eternal. Moreover manifestation even if illusory in this sense, has no end or beginning in itself, but only to the soul that withdraws from it. It goes on existing eternally to other souls, it goes on existing to the Eternal. It is in the eternal consciousness that it exists, though apart from that consciousness it has no existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover the stuff of which it is made is not nothingness or void, but the Eternal itself which manifests it from itself and out of its own substance cast into form and force. It is therefore not a real Nihil, but a limited and constantly renewed, recurrent or mutable existence.  It is therefore permissible to say that all being ranges between Manifestation and Non-Manifestation, for both are degrees of existence, the one rising towards the Absolute, the other in appearance, but in appearance only, determined and relative.  22  All existence is Brahman, Atman & Iswara, three names for one unnameable reality which alone exists.


Sri Aurobindo: We shall give to this sole real existence the general name of God, because we ﬁnd it ultimately to be not an abstract state of Existence not conscious of itself, but a supreme & self-aware One who exists — absolutely in Himself, inﬁnitely in the world & with an appearance of the ﬁnite in His various manifestations in the world.  God in Himself apart from all world manifestation or realisable relation to world manifestation is called the Paratpara Brahman, & is not knowable either to the knowledge that analyses or the knowledge that synthetically conceives. We can neither say of Him that He is personal or impersonal, existence or nonexistence, pure or impure, Atman or unAtman. We can only say to every attempt to deﬁne Him positively or negatively, neti neti, Not this, not this. We can pass into the Paratpara Brahman, but we cannot know the Paratpara Brahman.


Sri Aurobindo: God in the world is Brahman-Iswara-Atman, Prakriti or Shakti and Jiva. These are the three terms of His worldmanifestation.  23  The One and the Many are both of them eternal aspects of the Absolute Parabrahman which is Itself neither one nor many in an exclusive sense. It is beyond unity and multiplicity in its essential truth as it is beyond all other oppositions, but neither unity nor multiplicity, neither the One nor the Many are illusions, they are both of them truths of the Absolute, otherwise they could have no existence nor could they come into existence.


Sri Aurobindo: The world is a manifestation, and in it the absolute Parabrahman manifests as the Ishwara, the one Eternal, but also It manifests the multiplicity of the One in the Jiva. This creates in the manifestation the double aspect of Being and Becoming. But becoming does not mean that Being becomes what it never was before or that it ceases to be its eternal self; it manifests something that is already in its existence, a truth, a power, an aspect of itself; only the forms are temporal and can be deformed by the Ignorance.   The Power of itself which thus manifests what is in its being is its Shakti, Maya or Prakriti, three names for the same thing.


Sri Aurobindo: It is called Prakriti when it is seen in its executive aspect as working out the manifestation for the Purusha or Ishwara.  Whether we regard the soul that manifests in a body as a portion of the Divine, eternal therefore like the Divine, as is held by the Gita, or the Divine himself in his aspect of multiplicity, or a separate being dependent on the Divine, as is held by the dualists, or an illusory self-perception of the soul subject to Maya, the reality being the Divine himself, indivisible and ever unmanifested — one thing is certain that what appears as the Jiva is something unborn and eternal.  24  The self which we have to perfect, is neither pure atman which is ever perfect nor the ego which is the cause of imperfection, but the divine self manifested in the shifting stream of Nature.  Existence is composed of Prakriti & Purusha, the consciousness that sees and the consciousness that executes & formalises what we see.


Sri Aurobindo: The one we call Soul, the other Nature. These are the ﬁrst double term from which our Yoga has to start.   When we come to look in at ourselves instead of out at the world and begin to analyse our subjective experience, we ﬁnd that there are two parts of our being which can be, to all appearance, entirely separated from each other, one a consciousness which is still & passive and supports, and the other a consciousness which is busy, active & creative, and is supported. The passive & fundamental consciousness is the Soul, the Purusha, Witness or Sakshi; the active & superstructural consciousness is Nature, Prakriti, processive or creative energy of the Sakshi.


Sri Aurobindo: But the two seem at ﬁrst to stand apart & distinct, as if they had no share in each other.  The Purusha, still & silent witness of whatever Prakriti chooses to create, not interfering with her works, but reﬂecting only whatever forms, names & movements she casts on the pure mirror of his eternal existence and the Prakriti restlessly creating, acting, forming & effecting things for the delight of the Purusha, compose the double system of the Sankhyas.  But as we continue analysing their relations and accumulate more and more experience of our subjective life, we ﬁnd that this seeing of the Purusha is in effect a command. Whatever Prakriti perceives it to be the pleasure of the Purusha to see, she tends to preserve in his subjective experience or to establish; whatever she perceives it to be his pleasure to cease to see, she tends to renounce & abolish. Whatever he consents to in her, she forces on him & is glad of her mastery & his submission, but whenever he insists, she is bound eventually to obey.


Sri Aurobindo: Easily found to be true in our subjective experience, this ultimate principle of things is eventually discovered by the Yogin to determine even objective phenomena. The Purusha & Prakriti are therefore not only the Witness & the Activity witnessed, but the Lord & his executive energy. The Purusha is Ishwara, the Prakriti is His shakti. Their play with each other is both the motive & the executive force of all existence in the universe.  25


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine is the eternal Self and Spirit; but Nature too is everlasting power of the Self, eternal conscious-Force of the Spirit.  Mind, life and Matter are powers of that Power, energies of that Force, substance of that Spirit, Spirit and Matter are not separate and contrary creations, but Matter itself is a self-creation of the Spirit.  Being and Becoming are the single One. The One does not become the Many, but the One is for ever the Many even as the Many are for ever the One.  This by a self-existent self-knowledge thou shalt know, through a supramental knowledge by identity — the problem, the opposition, the shifts of philosophy, the rifts of Science, the fragmentary upliftings of Religion are the devices of a still ignorant consciousness, a [ . . . ] seeking knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: 26  All existence is one in the Reality; manifold in its manifestation of the Reality. The Reality is the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self, the Being, the One-Existence, which is all and everywhere, but which is also more than all and nowhere. This One can be all because it is no one in particular, it can be all-pervading and eternal in its essence because it is not bound by Space or by Time.  It is One but it is also multitudinous, its multitudes are the selfexpression, not the denial, the abundance, not the division or fragmentation of its oneness.


Sri Aurobindo: Each being of its multitudes seems to be a portion of the One, a ﬁnite of the Inﬁnite, a time-face and time-form of the Eternal; but in and behind this appearance is the Reality, and there each is itself the One displaying something of itself, each is the Inﬁnite in a ﬁnite phenomenon of itself, each is the Eternal playing in Time. But Time too is eternal, Time is eternity in extension and movement, therefore each is in its reality an eternal being of the Eternal, an inﬁnite of the Inﬁnite, a spirit of the One spirit, a self of the One Self. For the Reality is beyond our oppositions of one and many; its oneness and its multitude are for ever inherent in each other; yet it is bound neither by its unity nor its multiplicity, though both are true, because it is that of which both are intimate aspects, — it is the Absolute.  27  God is not a Being who creates & governs the universe, but the universe itself & all besides that is Timeless & Spaceless.


Sri Aurobindo: God is also a Being who creates the universe in Himself & governs it; for the universe is only one term of His existence.  If one could conceive a centre that contains its own circle, we might have a just deﬁnition of God in the universe.  What is the Impersonality of God? It is the fact of the Is Not, the Is & the Becoming. And what is the personality of God?


Sri Aurobindo: It is the fact that all this, the Is like the Becoming, the Is not like the Is, is aware of itself in Time & Space & beyond them.  The Impersonality of Love is a self-existent Delight which embraces, possesses & makes one in being all that manifests in Brahman. The Personality of Love is One who is aware of self-Delight & extends His Love in all creatures.  Personality & Impersonality are the same reality differently conceived by Knowledge. Ego is the consciousness of the One Inﬁnite Personality reﬂected in a limiting form of consciousness & distorted by the limitation.


Sri Aurobindo: The form itself is a face of the All which has forgotten in the succession of Time moments, in the coherence of Space-units all that is behind itself & involved in itself. Ego is a bridge by which it awakes to self-Ignorance & returns towards self-Knowledge.  If we stand on the bridge facing the world of Forms we tend towards the Relative; if we face away from them we tend towards the Absolute. It is only when we have crossed the bridge that we can easily & perfectly embrace the Relative in the Absolute.  Spirit & Matter, Pure Being & Being formally extended in Space are the two poles of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: In Spirit there is no ego; in substance of Matter there is no ego. In each pole ego loses itself, but in Spirit through synthesis, in Matter through dissolution.  Substance of matter, life & mind are the material which Ego uses to develop its conscious existence; there are higher inﬁnite afﬁrmations in which it fulﬁls its conscious existence.  There is a unity of essence & a unity of sum. The latter is only a synthetic formula & afﬁrmation of multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: The unity of essence is the true unity.  Unity & multiplicity are necessary to each other & one reality. Multiplicity is unity extended in its possibility; unity is multiplicity self-gathered into its essence[.]  28  The inﬁnite Being in rest aware of its own eternal oneness.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the everlasting silence of the Absolute.  The inﬁnite Conscious Power in movement aware of its own eternal many-ness — the everlasting movement and creation of the Supreme.  As in the immobile ether arises, ﬁrst sign of the creative impulse of Nature, vibration, Shabda, and this vibration is a line of etheric movement, is ether contacting ether in its own ﬁeld of mobile self-force and that primal stir is sufﬁcient to initiate all forms and forces, even such is the original movement of the Inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: But this vibration is not the stir of any material force or substance and this contact is not material contact. This is a vibration of consciousness in spiritual essence; this is the contact of consciousness with itself in spiritual substance.  This original movement, not original or ﬁrst in Time, for it was from ever and continues for ever, but original in that action of consciousness which is an eternal repetition of all things in an eternal present. Or, if you will, an eternal past-present-future, the three simultaneous times of that ever packed Time of the Inﬁnite that translates [to] our blind ﬁnite conception as the void timelessness of the Absolute.  29


Sri Aurobindo: All existence and all force proceeds from the One Supreme and all works of whatever being or whatever force are movements of the Universal and take place in the Eternal and Inﬁnite.  The Supreme is not manifest to our minds encased in matter; numberless superphysical planes separate our terrestrial consciousness from all direct touch of our Source, and there can be no question of an unveiled immediate intimate presence and guidance of that Ineffable. And yet the Divine Consciousness and Force, the everlasting Chitshakti, the original Power, the transcendent and eternal Mother, because she holds the Supreme concealed in her, can put us into some kind of touch with that inexpressible Glory and communicate to us a highest Will and its consequence. This cannot be done through the mind; for the thinking mind can only form some inadequate and quite abstract conception of an Absolute or a supreme Person or an impersonal Principle or Presence. And even the higher mind that experiences


Sri Aurobindo: returns only a pale reﬂection of Sachchidananda which it takes for that Ineffable or a vague sense of the Eternal or the Inﬁnite. It cannot lay hold upon That and it cannot enter, for if it tries, either that vanishes from it or itself it disappears in a featureless trance, extinction, annihilation, void or dissolution, nirvikalpa samadhi, nirvana, vinasha, shunya, laya. But what the mind cannot do, the soul and a great secret Overmind [can.]  To the earth-mind God does not exist or is only a mental idea, an emotional [ ] or the Life-mind’s projection and self-image[.]  30


Sri Aurobindo: Chitshakti not mind has created the world. Chitshakti is the thing which the Scientists call in its various aspects Force & Energy, but it is no material Force or Energy, it is the divine power of self-conscious Being forming itself not materially, not in substance of matter but in the substance of that self-consciousness into these images of form and force which make up the world.  What we call world, is a harmony of things seen not by the individual mind or even by universal mind, but rather seen through universal mind, as through a reﬂecting medium, by the Eye of divine Being. The eye that sees is immaterial, the things seen are immaterial; for matter itself is only a form, image & appearance of eternal Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: 31  How, it is asked, do we make a permanent and changeless world out of a world of changing and transient objects? But this is to create a problem where there is none. We do nothing of the kind; what we do is to perceive by the senses a world of stability in constant motion, of sameness in spite of change. It is the world that is like that; we do not make it so; our senses receive, they do not create; if there is an error in their perceptions or images it is a passive imperfection of sensing that causes the wrong or altered image, it is not a willed and dynamic change like the liberties the artist takes with Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: Men are always changing, but man has a permanent character which does not alter. Tigers differ from each other and from themselves in the process of time, but the tiger is always the same animal and always as such recognisable. It is the details that vary and change, the type, the fundamental pattern is constant. So far our senses and our mind standing upon their data do not betray or deceive us. If they see a world that is stable and the same in spite of constant mobility and mutation, it is because the world is like that and it is therefore that we have to see it so and cannot see it otherwise.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is a problem it is not what we make of it, not a problem of our psychology but why it is so, what is behind the mobility of the world and its stability, what is the cause or the signiﬁcance or reality of it. There is no doubt the problem of what are mind and sense and their nature, their reality, their relation to the world and its cause or signiﬁcance; but that too is a problem of metaphysics.  Are there then two worlds, the one changing and existing in time, the other changeless and eternal? Or are there rather two ways of knowing one and the same world? These questions, as they are put, are meaningless; for it is obvious that it is one world we are seeing and not two and that objects here belong to the same universe and not to two different universes at the same time.


Sri Aurobindo: It cannot be the truth that man belongs to one world and men in their mutability to another or that in seeing the changes and variations of the species tiger we are seeing the world in one way and when we see the persistence of type of the species we are knowing it in a different way. These artiﬁcial problems are the result of looking at words and concepts instead of things; we concentrate on the words and concepts “sameness” and “change”, see that they represent as abstractions ideas that stand opposed to each other, imagine that they are as opposed in fact as in our minds, are incompatible and therefore cannot coexist in the same world or cannot be true at the same time or in the same world-perception. As a matter of fact there is no such incompatibility; something that is permanently the same may be in constant change of its details of existence without losing its constant fundamental sameness. There is no reason why something should not be transient (not therefore unreal) in many of its phenomena, yet permanent in itself, in its being, whether that permanence be only a duration in time or eternal.  No doubt, two worlds may meet, world of mind or spirit enter into world of Matter, but then their elements combine into one world, a world let us say of mind-informed or spirit-governed Matter; it is not two separate worlds that we are seeing at the same time and confusing together by the erroneous action of our mind and senses.


Sri Aurobindo: Our souls, our minds may belong by origination to the mind world or spirit world, but here they are in the same world as the changing life and body and in so seeing it, we make no error.  32  A philosophy of change? But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status.


Sri Aurobindo: The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this “what” change could not be.  Change is evidently the change of some form or state of existence from one condition to another condition.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise, what is it? Is it itself fundamental and absolute, not explicable or deﬁnable by any other term than itself, perceivable and intelligible as the sole reality by a naked intuition which feels and cries out “Change = reality” and then falls dumb and can say no more?  An object changes, a person changes, a condition of things changes. But can it be said that the object is no real object but only a continuity of change, or that a person is not a person but a continuity of change, a condition of things is not a condition and there are no things but there is only a continuity of change? This seems to be an illustration of the besetting sin of metaphysics — to exalt a word into a reality or an idea into a reality — without fathoming what is the reality which it tries to indicate.


Sri Aurobindo: For to label with a word or name is not to fathom and to deﬁne, to erect a concept is not to fathom. Fathom for us then what is change before you ask us to accept it as the only reality. You may say I have fathomed it, I have seen it to be the one constant real, but do not ask me to deﬁne what it is; “listen rather in silence to the silence of Nature and you too will fathom”. But what if, so listening, I fathom other realities than change — let us say, immutable being as well as mutable force, status as well as change? To prevent that you plunge into speech and not silence, into dialectics of the intellect instead of the undebatable certitudes of intuition, and so abandon your own methodology.


Sri Aurobindo: If intuition alone is to be used, then you must give a place to my intuition as well as yours and all, however contradictory in appearance must stand until a greater intuition comes in to put all in their place, reconcile, include in a consistent whole.  In the world of our experience contradictories [are] often complements and necessary to each other’s existence. Change is possible only if there is a status from which to change; but status again exists only as a step that pauses, a step in the continuous passage of change or a step on which change pauses before it passes on to another step in its creative passage. And behind this relation is a duality of eternal status and eternal motion and behind this duality is something that is neither status nor change but contains both as its aspects — and That is likely to be the true Reality.  33


Sri Aurobindo: The nature of the Eternal is inﬁnite Being, the nature of Being is Self-Awareness and all-Awareness or Consciousness, the nature of conscious Being is conscious Force aware of its self and its action, the nature of conscious self-awareness is inﬁnite Bliss[.]   34  Identity is the ﬁrst truth of existence; division is the second truth; all division is a division in oneness. There is one Existence which looks at itself from many self-divided unities observing other similar and dissimilar self-divided unities by the device of division.


Sri Aurobindo: Being is one; division is a device or a secondary condition of consciousness; but the primary truth of consciousness also is a truth of oneness and identity. One consciousness organised in many self-divided unities of consciousness is the subjective nature of existence.  The objective side of consciousness is force, because consciousness is a power of being. The eternal primary action of this force is to make for its own consciousness forms or ﬁgures of its being.  All force is inherently conscious force.


Sri Aurobindo: Inhabiting and supporting every individual or universal form of being there is and must be some conscious power of being. But conscious force has the faculty of absorbing itself in its works and forms; there is in consciousness the power of self-oblivion. This self-oblivion is the primary phenomenon of material existence. But as [in] the sleeping or unconscious or self-oblivious man there is a subliminal self which neither sleeps nor forgets itself nor is unconscious, so in what appears to [be] inconscient form worked by an inconscient force or power of being there is, discoverable by extending knowledge, such a conscious power and that must be part of the conscious force of being of the one existence.  The nature of being aware of itself, in possession of all its consciousness and force is the inherent delight of its own existence.


Sri Aurobindo: For experience shows that all complete possession of self is delight, only imperfection of possession creates imperfection or apparent absence of delight. But the one existence takes an equal delight in all the universal forms and ﬁgures of its own being, and this delight is the cause and support of universal and individual existence. For this reason all creation also and all action of force has secretly or overtly delight or a seeking for delight or [?some] attraction as its ﬁrst motive cause, although the apparent object or aim of the action may seem to be of a different character.  These truths do not appear entirely to us because we start from division but they become self-evident when we get to a larger consciousness open to the conscious unity underlying things or one with the one conscious existence.  The One Existence whether we call it or him God, Brahman, Purusha or by some other name is in its or his nature inﬁnite existence aware of itself and its own eternal bliss of existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Or speaking less in terms of division and analysis it is one existence, consciousness, bliss in an inalienable unity.  35  The object and condition of Life is Ananda; the means of Ananda is Tapas; the nature of Tapas is Chit; the continent and basis of Chit is Sat. It is therefore by a process of Sat developing its own Ananda through Tapas which is Chit that the Absolute appears as the extended, the eternal as the evolutionary, Brahman as the world. He who would live perfectly must know Life, he who would know Life, must know Sacchidananda.


Sri Aurobindo: Pleasure is not Ananda; it is a half-successful attempt to grasp at Ananda by means which ensure a relapse into pain.  Therefore it is that pleasure can never be an enduring possession.  It is in its nature transient and fugitive. Pain itself is obviously not Ananda; neither is it in itself anything positive, real and necessary. It has only a negative reality.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a recoil caused by the inability to command pleasure from certain contacts which becomes habitual in our consciousness and, long ingrained in it, deludes us with the appearance of a law. We can rise above transitory pleasure; we can get rid of the possibility of pain.  Pleasure, therefore, cannot be the end & aim of life; for the true object and condition of Life is Ananda and Ananda is something in its nature one, unconditioned and inﬁnite. If we make pleasure the object of life, then we also make pain the condition of life. The two go together and are inseparable companions.


Sri Aurobindo: You cannot have one for your bed-fellow without making a lifecompanion of the other. They are husband and wife and, though perpetually quarrelling, will not hear of divorce.  But neither is pain the necessary condition of life, as the Buddhists say, nor is extinction of sensation the condition of bliss.  36  The world lives in and by Ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: From Ananda, says the Veda, we were born, by Ananda we live, to Ananda we return, and it adds that no man could even have the strength to draw in his breath and throw it out again if there were not this heaven of Bliss embracing our existence as ether embraces our bodies, nourishing us with its eternal substance and strength and supporting the life and the activity. A world which is essentially a world of bliss — this was the ancient Vedantic vision, the drishti of the Vedic drashta, which differentiates Hinduism in its early virility from the cosmic sorrow of Buddhism and the cosmic disillusionment of Mayavada. But it is possible to fall from this Bliss, not to realise it with the lower nature, in the Apara Prakriti, not to be able to grasp and possess it. Two things are necessary for the fullness of man’s bliss, — the fullness of his being and the fullness of his knowledge creating by their union the fullness of his strength in all its manifestations, viryam, balam, bhrajas, tejas, ojas. For Ananda, Sat & Chit make one reality, and Chit is in its outward working pure force to which our Rishis gave the name of Tapas.


Sri Aurobindo: To attain even here upon earth this fullness of bliss dependent upon fullness of existence, illumination and force, must always be humanity’s drift, man’s collective endeavour. To attain it within himself here and beyond, iha ca amutra ca, must always be the drift of the human unit, the individual’s endeavour. Wherever the knowledge in him thinks it can grasp this bliss, it will ﬁx its heaven. This is Swarga, Vaikuntha, Goloka; this is Nirvana.  37