The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7

The Problem of Evil

God has created the world, the material world as it is? Yes and No, more "No" than "Yes". For he has not created it directly. There have been many creators, rather formateurs, form-rqakers, in between the world and God, who joined in the work of creation. Who are they? They have been given various names. Creation generally follows a principle of gradation. It is done step by step, world rising out of world successively. Each world is a particular state of being, a particular mode of consciousness. Each state is inhabited by entities, individualities, personalities and each one has created a world around him or assisted in the creation of certain types or species upon earth. The last of these creators or Fashioners are those of the vital. At the top are those of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. It was these that created, that is to say, gave the first forms to earthly beings and things. They sent out their emanations and these again theirs in their turn and so on. Thus it was not the Divine Will which acted directly upon Matter and gave the world the form it could 'or should have had. There are layers and planes, graded intermediaries through which the Will has had to act. I spoke of the overmental and the vital plane. There is also the mental plane between them. There are mental beings who are also creators, giving form to some beings that have taken body upon earth.

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Thus, there is a tradition which says that the world of insects is the outcome of the creators of the vital world. That is why when you see the insects under a microscope they take on appearances that are absolutely diabolical. Enlarged on a screen they look like veritable monsters, so terrifying they are. Microscopic monsters they are. So it is said, beings of the vital world thought of amusing themselves and created these impossible beasts making human existence uncomfortable.

You can of course ask how these intermediaries themselves came into being, not out of the Divine? Intermediaries come out of other still higher and higher intermediaries till the chain reaches the Supreme. Originally, that is to say, if you trace back to the original source, there is there, of course, only the Divine. Then how has the deformation come in? I explained to you once that if you do not remain one with the Divine, under his direct influence, do not follow the movement of creation or expansion exactly as the Divine wills, this rupture of contact is sufficient to bring about the greatest evil of all, division. Even the most luminous, the most powerful beings may decide to follow their own movement instead of obeying the divine movement. They may be in themselves marvellous beings, and human beings, if they saw them, would take them for the Divine himself, yet they can, since they follow their own will and work not in harmony with the universe, be the source of the greatest disorders. There is nothing that is not the Divine, only there comes about a disorder,

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that is to say, each thing is not in its proper place. The problem is, this has to be remedied.

As to the question why this deviation, this evil at all, I can say, first of all, what you call evil may be only what is not convenient to you, but from the standpoint of universal arrangement that may be the most convenient. Secondly, the thing might have been just an accident, so to say, in the beginning. And what we are concerned with is not so much its why or even how but with the remedy to be found for the evil that is there. Viewing philosophically, however, we may note that the universe in which we live is evidently one movement out of many (actual and possible), that it follows its own law which is not the same elsewhere, that if the principle on which this universe has been created is that of free will, then you cannot prevent the disorderly movement from happening until a knowledge comes and illumines the choice. If one is free to choose, one may choose the wrong thing, not necessarily the right thing, for if it were decided from beforehand that the choice must be always good and in the right direction, then the choice will no longer be free.

But in reality these questions cannot be adequately answered in that way. It is a problem to which mental answers—of which the mental formulations even—only serve to diminish the dimensions of the problem; the question itself reduces the problem to a more or less elementary formula corresponding only vaguely and superficially and incompletely to the reality of things.

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To be able to understand you must become. If you want to understand the why and the how of the universe you must identify yourself with the universe. And that is not easy.

In truth the question itself is wrong. It is childish. It presupposes things that are themselves questionable. There are certain ideas about creation which have been almost universally current, more or less permanently accepted by human thought during ages; they are of an astounding simplicity. There is a world here, it is said, and up there somewhere there is a being called God. This person one day thought of creating some kind of thing, a visible form. The world was the result. Evidently we see a lot of mistakes in his work. We conclude the creator perhaps is a well-meaning benevolent person, but not all-powerful; some other thing or being there is that contradicts him. Or perhaps he is all-powerful but then has no heart and must be cruelty itself—viewing the condition of his creation which is a story of sorrow and trouble and misery. Such an idea, I say, is simplicity itself, the simplicity of a child brain. When one speaks of God the creator as a potter making a pot, one thinks of him as a human being, only in bigger proportions. Truly, it is not God who has made man in his image, it is man who has made God in his image.

As I say, the question is wrongly put. The very form of the question already assumed a certain notion about God and creation. Your postulates or axioms themselves are vitiated.

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The universe and its creator are not separate things, they are one and identical in their origin. The universe is God himself projected into Space (and Time). So the universe is the Divine in one aspect or another. You cannot divide the two, making one the creator and the other his work, the watchmaker and his watch. You put your idea of the Divine upon him and ask, why he has created such a nasty world. If the Divine were to answer, "It is not I, it is yourself. Become myself again, you will no longer feel and see as you do now. You are not yourself, therefore your question and your problem"! Indeed when you unite your consciousness with the divine consciousness there is no longer any problem. Everything appears then natural and simple, and correct and as it should be. It is when you cut yourself from your origin and stand outside, in front of him and against him that all the trouble begins. Of course you may ask, how is it that the Divine has tolerated a part of himself going out and separating itself and creating all this disorder? I would reply on behalf of the Divine, "If you want to know, you had better unite yourself with the Divine, for that is the only way of knowing why he has done so. It is not by questioning him by your mind that you will get the answer. The mind cannot know. And I repeat, when you come to this identification, all problems are solved. The feeling, one can explain, that things are not all right, that they should be otherwise comes precisely from the fact that there is a divine will unfolding itself in a continuous progression, that things

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that were and are have to give place to things that shall be and shall be better and better than they have been. The world that was good yesterday will no longer be so tomorrow. The universe might have appeared quite harmonious in some other age but now appears quite discordant: it is because we see the possibility of a better universe. If we found it as it should be, we would not do what we have to do, we would not try to make it better. Even so, we would conceive the Divine in a very human way; for we remain imprisoned within ourselves, confined to this consciousness of ours which is like a grain of sand in the infinite immensity. You want to understand the immensity? That is not possible. It is possible only under one condition; be one with the immensity. The drop of water cannot very well ask how is the ocean: it has to lose itself into the ocean.

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