Preparing for the Miraculous

10: Theodicy: “Nature does not Make Mistakes”

The term “theodicy” comes from the Greek “theos,” which means god, and “dikè,” which means justice. “Theodicy” could therefore be defined as “the justification of divine providence in view of the existence of evil and suffering in the world.” According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary the meaning is “defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.” The definition in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is “explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty and all-knowing God permits evil.” Both definitions omit suffering.

The Problem

The intractable problem of evil and suffering is glaringly present in the written testimonies of all cultures past and present. It is the cause of consternation when confronted with the Holocaust, a tsunami or other catastrophes, as well as when confronted with the torture and the vicious or random killing of a few or even a single human being. To this problem every religion has to find an answer in order to justify the actions of its God, whoever he is supposed to be. Sri Aurobindo considered the problem as follows in The Life Divine: “God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say that pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God – an excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and Love whom we can worship, only a God of might to whose law we must submit or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture as a means of test and ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate cruelty or of moral insensibility and, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the highest instinct of his own creatures.” ¹

In modern day philosophy and science we find the problem voiced for instance in this way: “When you consider all the physical suffering that there is in the world; when you consider the stupidity of a good number of people; when you consider the cataclysms of nature; when you consider that all of human life is only a transitory phase of the universe, I think it is difficult to suppose that [the] omnipotence [of God] could not possibly have done better.” (Bertrand Russell) “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” (Richard Dawkins) “Omnipotence raises some awkward theological questions. Is God free to prevent evil? If he is omnipotent, yes. Why then does he fail to do so? This devastating argument was deployed by [the philosopher] David Hume: if the evil in the world is from the intention of the Deity, then he is not benevolent. If the evil is contrary to his intention, he is not omnipotent. He cannot be both omnipotent and benevolent (as most religions claim).” (Paul Davies)

The God here put into question is the Abrahamic God who stands outside the creation brought by him into being and for which he is therefore responsible. Theologians of the Abrahamic religions may say that he is an abstract God, rare mystics in these religions may say that he can be met in the heart, yet the general idea is that of an anthropomorphic autocrat floating somewhere above the clouds or sitting on a throne in heaven.

The “integral Vedantic affirmation” agrees with the mystics, because its perception of God is a matter of spiritual experience confirmed by many great experiencers: rishis, seers, yogis, mystics. According to this affirmation all is God, all is the Brahman, all is That, all is the Self, and there cannot be anything outside or apart from That. “If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must also be true that all is the Self,” asserts Sri Aurobindo. “And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscious All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested.

“The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. … For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than itself, since no such thing exists. Nor can we suppose that it submits unwillingly to something partial within itself which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradiction of an All and something other than the All.

“Even if we say that the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomenon of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.” ²

Delight of Existence

One of the main tenets of Vedanta is that the ultimate attributes of the Divine are sat-chit/tapas-ananda, Existence-Consciousness/Force-Bliss. This is what in the last or highest instance can be said of the Divine. These attributes are one, they are not and cannot be separate. The singing word ananda is the most difficult to translate, it means the most intense joy, delight, felicity, ecstasy or bliss. This is a divine attribute, different from any of the human feelings suggested by the enumeration. “The truth is ananda,” writes Sri Aurobindo. “But this is a knowledge for which mankind is not ready.” ³ “Delight is existence, Delight is the secret of creation; Delight is the root of birth, Delight is the cause of remaining in existence, Delight is the end of birth and that into which creation ceases. ‘From Ananda,’ says the Upanishad, ‘all existences are born, by Ananda they remain in being and increase, to Ananda they depart.’” ⁴ And the Mother said: “It is Joy that has created, it is Joy that will accomplish.” ⁵

“Absoluteness of conscious existence is illimitable bliss of conscious existence; the two are only different phrases for the same thing. All illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is pure delight.” ⁶ But then: “This ancient Vedantic theory of cosmic origin is immediately confronted in the human mind by two powerful contradictions, the emotional and sensational consciousness of pain and the ethical problem of evil. For if the world be an expression of Sachchidananda, not only of existence that is conscious force – for that can easily be admitted – but of existence that is also infinite self-delight, how are we to account for the universal presence of grief, of suffering, of pain?” asks Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. “All being Sachchidananda, how can pain and suffering at all exist?” ⁷

He approaches the problem from four angles. The first one, quite revelatory, is that we are not consciously aware of “the pleasure of existence” by which we are carried through all our life experiences, negative as well as positive. In fact “we shall find that the sum of the pleasure of existence far exceeds the sum of the pain of existence … Precisely because the latter is normal, we do not treasure it … The normal satisfaction of existence which is always there regardless of event and particular cause or object, affects us as something neutral which is neither pleasure nor pain.” It is actually this mostly subconscious pleasure of existence which keeps us going through thick and thin. “There too hidden, profound, subconscious, it is that which enables and compels things to remain in existence. It is the reason of that clinging to existence, that overmastering will-to-be, translated vitally in the instinct of self-preservation, physically as the imperishability of matter, mentally as the sense of immortality which attends the formed existence through all its phases of self-development.” ⁸

“We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being; so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature. …

“Sensation and emotion are, in their essential being, the pains no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but fail to reveal – fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.” ⁹

Sri Aurobindo’s second point is the one we have already mentioned above: that the Judeo-Christian God stands outside his creation, and that therefore the flaws in this creation must be his handiwork. “The difficulty [i.e. the problem of suffering and evil] arises only if we assume the existence of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering for His creatures, but Himself stands above and unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law … then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving.” The Vedanta, on the contrary, establishes that “all that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and suffering in the creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The problem then changes entirely. The question is no longer how came God to create for His creatures a suffering and evil of which He is Himself incapable and therefore immune, but how came the sole and infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is not bliss, that which seems to be its positive negation.” ¹⁰

Suffering and evil are ethical problems which we measure according to moral norms. Sri Aurobindo, thirdly, draws our attention to this and makes us realize that “we do not live in an ethical world. … Material nature is not ethical … Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical, although as it progresses it manifests the crude material out of which the highest animal evolves the ethical impulse.” (Evolutionary psychology will agree with this.) Ethics is a matter of the mind and therefore a stage in evolution. It is “man the mental being” who evaluates God as obligatorily “good” – an attribute which is not there in the Vedantic trinity.¹¹

It is only from the human standpoint that the world has three layers: infra-ethical, ethical, supra-ethical. “The ethical standpoint applies only to a temporary though all-important passage from one universality to another.” Sri Aurobindo calls this passage all-important because it relates to the crucial human role in the evolution of life on Earth. The human is the great X, the ensouled intermediary between the animal and the “supra-man.” It is in this passage from the lower to the higher life-forms that “there intervenes the phenomenon of pain and suffering which seems to contradict the fundamental nature of its being. This and this alone is the root-problem. … There is an anandamaya behind the manomaya [the central sense perception], a vast Bliss-Self behind the limited mental self, and the latter is only a shadowy image and disturbed reflection of the former. The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface.” ¹²

Fourthly, suffering, like everything else in nature, has its function and meaning. “Pain of mind and body is a device of Nature, that is to say, of Force in her works, meant to subserve a definite transitional end in her upward evolution. … It does not come into being in the purely physical world so long as Life does not enter into it; for till then mechanical methods are sufficient. Its office begins when life with its frailty and imperfect possession of Matter enters on the scene; it grows with the growth of Mind in life. … Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind. This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. … The nature of suffering is a [provisional] failure of the conscious-force in us to meet the shocks of existence and a consequent shrinking and contraction, and its root is an inequality of that receptive and possessing force due to our self-limitation by egoism consequent on the ignorance of our true Self, of Sachchidananda.” ¹³

If one does not accept the reality of the spirit, considerations like the above are impossible to accept from a materialistic viewpoint, but then an understanding of the problem of suffering and evil remains out of the question. If one accepts the reality of the spirit but has not realized the cosmic consciousness, these considerations are not concretely comprehensible. But if the fundamental Vedantic premises and the Vedantic conception of the universe are accepted or experienced as valid, the logical conclusion is inevitable.

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has expressed the same point of view as follows:

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,
Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,
It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.

And he has the divine sage Narad say to Savitri’s royal parents:
Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come …

Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience
Which was thy body’s dumb original base …

Pain is the hammer of the gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart …

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness …¹⁴

“In Nature There Are no Errors”

The first premise of Vedanta, its “integral affirmation,” is that all is That. “Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.” ¹⁵ “All action, all mental, vital, physical activities in the world are the operation of a universal Energy, a Consciousness-Force which is the power of the Cosmic Spirit working out the cosmic and individual truth in things.” Therefore “in reality all that we call undivine can only be an action of the four divine principles themselves.” Each principle is also the other principles and the Divine as a whole. “Each single act and movement falls by the fiat of the omnipotent omniscience which works as the Supermind inherent in things.” ¹⁶ “Chance is not in this universe,” writes Sri Aurobindo in his Thoughts and Aphorisms.¹⁷ If there were chance in this universe, it would not be an inherent manifestation of the divine Unity and Truth. The Divine would be a flawed Entity.

If all is the One, then nature in her entirety is also the One. “What Nature does, is really done by the Spirit.” ¹⁸ “All her works are instinct with an absolute intelligence.” ¹⁹ Nature is part of the divine manifestation; the divine manifestation is the work of the divine Power, the Consciousness/Force, also called the Great Mother, or known as Maya, Prakriti, Lila.²⁰ “World is the play of the Mother of things moved to cast Herself for ever into infinite forms and avid of eternally outpouring experiences.” ²¹ This leads to the conclusion that there cannot be any mistakes in Nature. “When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a figure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology and experience, for in Nature there are no errors but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and retraced in a prefigured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her gradual advance.” ²² And Sri Aurobindo affirms: “We may be sure that if [in Nature] destruction is done, it is that for that end the destruction was indispensable.” ²³

If there are no errors in Nature, and if there is no chance, and if all is the Divine, suffering and evil must also be That. But this does not answer the burning question “Why?” arising from the bleeding heart of humanity, as it arose from the lips of the Mother herself – Pourquoi ? – in the last years of her avataric yoga. Sri Aurobindo puts the question bluntly and gives the following answer: “But still what is the purpose and origin of the disharmony – why came this division and ego, this world of painful evolution? Why must evil and sorrow enter into the divine Good, Bliss and Peace? It is hard to answer to the human intelligence on its own level, for the consciousness to which the origin of this phenomenon belongs and to which it stands as it were automatically justified is a supra-intellectual knowledge, is a cosmic and not an individualized human intelligence …” ²⁴

The mind of the human being, halfway up the ladder of evolution, is an instrument that only can grasp part of a whole, not the whole itself. The divine manifestation is a constant cosmic act of Consciousness/Force which far exceeds the ordinary capacity of the human mind, but which can be and has been acceded to by humans in a spiritual widening called “cosmic consciousness.” We do indeed find in some mystics who have been capable of acquiring the cosmic consciousness the supreme affirmation that all is good or right as it is. It is however in the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that we find the supreme justification of the divine manifestation in its origin, its evolution, and its glorious, endless future end.

The Gnostic Explanation

The following story told by the Mother to the Ashram youth contains in essence the theodicy of Gnosticism throughout the centuries, while also completing it. The Mother stressed that it was “a story,” and that one could know its inner meaning only by experience on the spiritual path.

“When the Supreme decided to exteriorize Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorized was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it [i.e. the Great Mother]. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation.” (It may be noted here that the crucial principles of Joy and Freedom at the origin of creation are hardly ever mentioned elsewhere in the gnostic literature.)

“So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings [or Forces] were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings [the four essential attributes of the Divine] were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth. You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very [divine] principles of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for the creation was to be Freedom itself … As soon as they set to work – they had their own idea of how it had to be done – being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument … they took the attitude of the master [of the Ego], and this mistake – as I may call it – was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation – for this is the essential cause, separation – as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness turned into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder. …

“The creative Force [i.e. the Great Mother] which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, saw what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for a remedy and a cure of the evil that had been done. Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it Consciousness, Love and Truth, and to begin the movement of redemption, which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin. And this is my story.” ²⁵

This is the wording of one version of the Mother’s story, which she has told or referred to on other occasions also. It is noteworthy that it was the Great Mother’s second intervention which created the possibility of the manifestation to return to its Origin instead of having to remain forever separated from it. The divine Love which she poured into it would be incarnated in the progressive succession of the Avatars enabling and supporting the evolution. This Love would also create the presence of the soul, the divine Self, in the manifestation. Hidden in the lower evolution, it would become consciously active in the human being, and, once fully developed, it will give shape to the species of the future, the spiritual superman.

When the plunge happened into the Darkness and Inconscience of the separation, which the Mother said was “an accident,” “immediately something else sprang forth form the Source which probably would not have manifested if this accident had not taken place. If Delight had remained Delight, conceived as Delight, and everything [of the manifestation] had come about in Delight and Union instead of in division, there would never have been any need for the divine Consciousness to plunge into the inconscience as Love.” ²⁶ This is the justification of our evolutionary universe.

The four great beings, cause and basis of the manifestation, were the Lords of Falsehood, Ignorance (or Inconscience), Suffering, and Death. Through them the Divine plunged into its opposite, for reasons called his Lila in the Hindu tradition, which also means that they were fundamentally known to himself alone. (As we have seen in the previous section, they are still unknowable to humanity on its evolutionary pilgrimage.)

Sri Aurobindo mentions them in his sonnet “The Iron Dictators:”

I looked for Thee alone, but met my glance
The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath,
Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance,
High sovereign Lords of suffering and death.

Whence came those formidable autarchies,
From what inconscient blind infinity … ? ²⁷

Numerous instances could be cited from the gnostic tradition in which this kind of knowledge was very much alive. The Bible too has a similar knowledge, but there the four “fallen” Powers are reduced to only one, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. “How are you fallen from heaven, day star, son of the dawn! How are you fallen to earth, conqueror of the nations! You said in your heart: ‘I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God, I will set my throne on high … I will ascend upon the high clouds. …’ But you are brought down to darkness, to the depths of the pit.” (Isaiah 14:12-15)

It is of prime importance to realize that the evolution, the road back to the glory of the Origin, started from the absolute negation, from the extreme contraries of that Origin. In some traditions and religions (Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and even Christianity) the separation between Positive and Negative, Light and Darkness has been seen as permanent. In the Vedantic view, which is the basis of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vision, all is one and all is the One, so that a permanent separation or duality is impossible. Behind the Mother’s story one sees the Love which is the Ananda of the Divine in everything. It is the power of this Love, incarnated in the soul and in the Avatars, which in the course of the ages has brought movement and Life into the stagnant “bottomless Zero” at the beginning of the slow climb upwards.

If one talks of evil and the Asuras who are its personalized powers, one should remember that in the beginning all was Darkness and Ignorance in the most absolute sense. From that Inconscient the Subconscient and Matter have emerged. The Inconscient we cannot imagine; what “Matter” means, science has given us a more complete idea in its discoveries of the billions of galaxies, the fantastic fireworks of the material universe, and the wonders in the subatomic world; the Subconscient is the murky waters in which our life and our mental consciousness have taken shape and on which they are still floating. Life and Mind are the level accelerating evolution has reached in the human being. We are the children of the evolution as concentrated in the workings of Mother Earth, which means that we are carrying the cosmic past, from its very beginnings, in us, even in our cells.

Inflicting still its habits on the cells
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.²⁸

It is the weight of this past in us that causes what Sri Aurobindo has called “the downward gravitation,” so easy to give in to. Yet the whole sense of the involutionary plunge, also called “the Fall,” and the effort towards the recovery of the original divinity lies in the Love and Ananda which are redeeming all.

“It was you …”

History is for the most part a horror story, with only here and there an oasis of rationality, beauty, kindness or love. It was not for nothing that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother so often called Homo sapiens “the human animal,” for this is what we still are. True spirituality is not only a matter of ethereal experiences, hearing bells or hovering a foot above the ground. Especially Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga has turned the arrow of the yogic aspiration around, from exclusively upwards to also downwards, aimed at the nether regions of our humanity, at the realms of the lower chakras. For if the transformation of this part of Nature in us is not possible, there is no hope that humanity and the world would ever change.

If one is aware of this, one must also realize the priceless value of the treasure India has discovered, kept and guarded for humanity. Of humanity’s ordeal her tradition gives the only coherent explanation based on a vast experience, together with a certainty of the meaning of the ordeal and its inevitable outcome in the Light. For the human condition is not the doubtful result of the intentional actions of a good God, it is God himself in action. We, humans, are God in action, for he is everything we are, can be and will be – and have been. The plunge, the separation in the Mother’s story, was the Lila of the Divine, and therefore our Lila, for “we are that.” If the Vedantic premises are correct, then this is the logical conclusion. It is the conclusion we find in Sri Aurobindo.

In a letter, afterwards published in The Riddle of This World, he, the seer and knower, wrote: “But still what is the purpose and origin of the disharmony – why came this division and ego, this world of painful evolution? Why must evil and sorrow enter into the divine Good, Bliss and Peace? It is hard to answer to the human intelligence on its own level, for the consciousness to which the origin of this phenomenon belongs and to which it stands as it were automatically justified in a supra-intellectual knowledge, is a cosmic and not an individualized human intelligence: it sees in larger spaces, it has another vision and cognition, other terms of consciousness than human reason and feeling.

“To the human mind one might answer that while in itself the Infinite might be free from those perturbations, yet once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the apparent effective negation – with all its consequences – of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one. If it is asked why even if possible it should have been accepted, the answer nearest to the Cosmic Truth which the human intelligence can make is that in the relations or in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable.

“For once it appears it acquires for the soul descending into evolutionary manifestation an irresistible attraction which creates the inevitability – an attraction which in human terms on the terrestrial level might be interpreted as the call of the unknown, the joy of danger and difficulty and adventure, the will to attempt the impossible, to work out the incalculable, the will to create the new and the uncreated with one’s own self and life as the material, the fascination of contradictories and their difficult harmonization – these things translated into another supraphysical, superhuman consciousness, higher and wider than the mental, were the temptation that led to the fall.

“For in the original being of light on the verge of the descent the one thing unknown was the depth of the abyss, the possibilities of the Divine in the Ignorance and Inconscience. On the other side from the Divine Oneness a vast acquiescence, compassionate, consenting, helpful, a supreme knowledge that this thing must be, that having appeared it must be worked out, that its appearance is in a certain sense part of the incalculable infinite wisdom, that if the plunge into Night was inevitable the emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme Truth be effected – by a working out with its phenomenal opposites as the starting-point of the evolution, as the condition laid down for a transforming emergence.

“In this acquiescence was embraced too the will of the great Sacrifice, the descent of the Divine itself into the Inconscience to take up the burden of the Ignorance and its consequences, to intervene as the Avatar and the Vibhuti walking between the double sign of the Cross and the Victory towards the fulfilment and deliverance. A too imagined rendering of the inexpressible Truth? But without images how to present to the intellect a mystery far beyond it? It is only when one has crossed the barrier of the limited intelligence and shared in the cosmic experience and the knowledge which sees things from identity that the supreme realities which lie behind these images – images corresponding to the terrestrial fact – assume their divine forms and are felt as simple, natural, implied in the essence of things. It is by entering into that greater consciousness alone that one can grasp the inevitability of its self-creation and purpose.” ²⁹

Nirodbaran, then the Ashram doctor, wrote a daily report to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo about the condition of the sadhaks under his care. It was Sri Aurobindo who wrote the answers about what Nirodbaran had to do in his dispensary or at the local hospital, and who also answered the doctor’s more personal queries concerning his sadhana. These answers developed into a treasure of wisdom and simplicity – and humor. For because of a reason Sri Aurobindo did not disclose – “Let it have no name,” he wrote – he suddenly gave expression to the humorous side in him which otherwise had to be kept hidden for fear of misunderstanding.

In this Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, unique in the spiritual literature, there is a page where Nirodbaran vented one of his bouts of yogic depression and doubt about the meaning of it all. Sri Aurobindo answered him: “In the beginning it was you (not the human you which is now complaining but the central being) who accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance. Sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its initial transcendence but under conditions for which the plunge into the Inconscience was necessary. It is fundamentally a cosmic problem and can be understood only from the cosmic consciousness. If you want a solution which will be agreeable to the human mind and feelings, I am afraid there is none. No doubt, if human beings had made the universe, they would have done much better, but they were not there to be consulted when they were made. Only your central being was there.” ³⁰

This answer contains in a nutshell, and in the most limpid language, much of what has been considered in this talk. Sri Aurobindo wrote the same in the mantric lines of Savitri:

O mortal who complainst of death and fate,
Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;
This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,
Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.

Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.

It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.

Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night …³¹

And it took the plunge into the abyss, thrilled by “the adventure of consciousness” that would be the effort of the return to the Origin, of the Self-rediscovery. This plunge it could take because it was That possessing the powers of That. And the effort of the return it could envisage because one of those powers was Ananda, which assured that it would be equal to the epic repetition of suffering, death and rebirth, many times and in many ways. This quest for the true Graal is the quest of the Divine for himself, which

… None could bear but for his strength within,
Yet none would leave because of his delight.³²