Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Lecture III

Chap. 6. Man in the Universe

Chap. 7. The Ego and the Dualities

Last time we got to the point where the emergence of the self-aware being was a great fact of evolutionary life. Man in the universe is really Conscious Existence which has become self-aware. In the language of the Vedas it is the Dawn. This Dawn is the awakening of human consciousness to its divine possibility, and the basis of this self-aware being we call Satchidananda. The Dawn represents the awakening to this infinite existence, infinite consciousness, infinite delight, Satchidananda. In one sense we can say that Satchidananda is here as the universe which the human consciousness tries to know all the time. This self-awareness therefore represents this infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite delight. It does not know that it is seeking That, though in reality it is seeking only That. This universal existence has become self-aware in man. It has, therefore, a chance of becoming master of itself. And because self-awareness promises a chance of discovering the divine Self, it is called the Dawn. It opens the chance for further unfoldment of the human individual toward the fulfilment of That which has unrolled itself as the cosmos. The individual and the universal are terms of this Unknowable, this Unknowable which represents itself to man as Infinite, Satchidananda.

Whatever the human consciousness may be seeking it is, in reality, seeking the Infinite, Satchidananda. When man wants to progress it means that the self-awareness which has awakened in the cosmos wants to attain not merely objects, material and non-material, but another consciousness. The drive for progress, for amelioration, is the indication for changing his consciousness, for widening his awareness, for expansion

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of his being. Man wants to expand into or ascend to another consciousness. In this lies his real progress. Man's progress does not He in moving towards fulfilment of his vital desires and his mental ideas and its forms and of his emotional being but in growing toward and ascending to a universal consciousness, and from there rising to the highest attempt possible,—to the Transcendent consciousness. That is the real line of progress of the individual.

A glance at the working of this Satchidananda consciousness in the universe shows that: its infinite energy first casts itself in dumb material forms. Satchidananda there seems to be asleep, it is as it were in trance in matter. From there the energy struggles upwards into varied life-rhythms, forms and energies. In life the dumb movement is seeking but is not self-aware. The vegetable kingdom, the insect world, the animal world is not self-aware—it is, at the most vitally aware. Self-awareness has not yet come though a greater degree of consciousness has come into expression. And life therefore slowly has to struggle and emerge into mind; and in the mind, for the first time, one feels a subjective self, that is to say, a conscious individuality. This Infinite Consciousness Being and Delight, beginning with the dumb sleep of matter, creates forms and separateness of objects. From there it struggles into life and then, into various patterns and variations of life. And when it struggles and creates mind then it succeeds in creating the individual.

So the labour of the cosmic energy all along has been to create this individual, to create the self-aware centre of receptivity, a subjective self. Thus,one sees,as Sri Aurobindo says in the The Life Divine, that the universe is a diffusion of this Divine All, in infinite time and infinite space. And from that point of view the individual is its concentration and not diffusion. First it is a sort of diffusion, a throwing itself out into a multiplicity so to say, or into innumerable variety in matter or in

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life or in mind. But the individual is the concentration of the Divine within limits of time and space, and matter.

And then we try to see in what consists this conscious individuality which makes possible the breaking of the Dawn. What is the meaning of this coming into existence of a conscious individual in an inconscient universe ? He speaks of it as a crucial point or "a crisis" in the process of evolution. A crisis in the process of evolution came when mind awoke up into self-awareness and the individual was created because then he brought into actual dynamic movement the process of expanding out from the individual into the Cosmic, into the Transcendent. That process becomes possible only when the mind having come into existence becomes self-aware in man, in the subjective self, in the individual. And this individual is the centre of reception or of self-awareness or of concentration of the Divine in limited time and space and then the whole of the universe comes to this individual.

The universe comes to the individual,—the living and thinking human being—in the form of life. The individual meets first the dynamic movement of life. Man has first to master this life; for, in that lies man's progress. Life is the objective form and man is the subjective aspect of the universe. At first life poses a challenge, and the world acts as hostile to man. Then man gets attached to life, he gets enamoured of it, and does not see the need of understanding life. Man is not interested in knowing the secret of life. He wants to serve the demands of life. He does not realise that life is trying to exceed its limitations, it is aspiring to ascend to a higher plane. It is sad to see that man submits himself to life and acts as if satisfying the demands of life,—its impulses, desires, passions, greeds and ambitions,—wire the highest goal of man. In order to fulfil the true goal man has to understand and master life, he has to ascend to a level beyond life. In fact, the universe comes to the individual with a question, with

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a demand—that he should know and master it. The individual instead of understanding and mastering life goes on playing with it, submitting himself to it and generally goes round and round.

The reason why the universe as life-spirit comes to man is that man holds potentialities higher than life, he is the centre of those high potentialities. For example, man can bring into life the working of the Divine consciousness.

If the conditions are as we have stated above, how can we, then, affirm the possibility of divine life on earth ? That can only be if man can accept that there is something within him which is essentially superior to his present egoistic self, and that it is possible to attain it. In that acceptance of the higher possibility of man lies the basis of divine life. The difficulty is that man accepts his present life with all its difficulties, sufferings, pain etc. and believes that life is bound to be eternally subject to its imperfections. The problem is given up as "impossible".

Sri Aurobindo makes us see that life is Cosmos coming to man with a question : can you affirm and attain something greater than life? If man can answer in the affirmative then life divine becomes possible.

Then, instead of being eternally condemned, life becomes an opportunity. It is not an affliction or punishment, but a condition for progress to something greater than what man is at present. He writes in his epic Savitri:

Existence a divine experiment

Cosmos the Soul's opportunity.

Ashwapathy, father of Savitri, who is the representative of the human race in its cultural advance "Saw the life that is, from a life that is to be." From the point of view of its future evolution he saw the actual working of life. Today

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man only sees what 'is' but he cannot see the potentialities of life. If he could see them then he would find the justification of all the complications and difficulties which life presents to man. He does not see that man would not eternally remain what he is. If man is bound to remain as he is then one must admit that ignorance is the permanent element of the universe and not a passing phase. The Omnipotence of the Divine loses its sense in that case : ignorance would be more powerful than the Divine Omnipotence.

Sri Aurobindo lays down that if the self-aware individual admits the possibility of awakening to a condition better than his present egoistic nature, then life divine can start. That, in fact, has been man's constant effort throughout the ages.

There is the problem of ego and dualities. An infinite being, consciousness, delight—Satchidananda—is the cause of and material substance of creation; it has put itself out in terms of cosmic and individual manifestation. But one sees in life not being or consciousness but inconscience, not delight but pain and suffering not harmony but discord and strife, not immortality but the reign of death. The question is why is this so ? How does it happen ?

Sri Aurobindo gave an answer to these questions in a letter to Maurice Magre, a French savant, who came to Pondicherry. It is published under the title The Riddle of this World. The question was : how does a world of imperfection come out of an original Divine perfection. The answer is : it is due to the divided being which distorts the original truth. How did it happen—this division ? It is caused by the separation of man's consciousness from its origin, the Divine. It is this that the Bible speaks of as the "fall of man". The temptation of Adam by Eve is the temptation of the Soul —the Purusha—by the potentialities of Nature : the Soul

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was attracted by Nature. The question arises why did the Absolute abandon its status and create this imperfect world ? The difficulty is to explain the basic unity and diversity with the existence of a condition contrary to it; for, to the mind, to understand something preexistent to it is hard. Mind is a creation of the fall, of the duality, created by separation from the Supreme. It can be answered by mind rising to the Supreme. But mind cannot be easily raised to the Higher Consciousness unless it is willing. That means a process of growth—it means Sadhana. For that to become possible mind has to admit some Reality greater than itself—it has to become quiet and open to the Higher Truth.

But we have first to try to convince the mind by logic. We start with the Absolute,—it is not zero, it is not void, it is not nothing. It must contain within itself infinite potentialities of knowledge, power, creativity etc. These potentialities do not exhaust the Absolute. Now, mathematically, these potentialities can contain an opposite possiblity —the negation of the Absolute. One of such potentialities is that the Absolute that is all-Knowledge, all-Consciousness etc. can become inconscient. These are not vain and abstract possibilities as we find in our mental consciousness. Mental ideas and truths are not all realisable in life. One can say that mental potentialities have not sufficient power to realize themselves in life. But we are considering the potentialities of the Absolute when mind was not created. These potentialities are charged with the power of realising themselves. It is the 'Divine-Idea', as Sri Aurobindo puts it in The Life Divine: it is Real-Idea, all its potentialities are charged with the power of the Supreme, filled with the power of self-realisation. Now, the one potentiality of the Absolute is to materialise the very opposite of itself, to become absolute Inconscience. An illustration might make the point clear. If an emperor should get into his mind the whim of relinquishing

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his throne in order to test whether the empire would come back to him in his self-exile, he being an absolute monarch can carry out his idea and become either an ordinary citizen or even a beggar. In the same way, something similar has taken place on the plane of the Absolute. The Absolute even when it accepts to become Inconscience has the power to recover its original status, because it has omnipotent power. This actualisation of the contrary to the Absolute is the Universe. Mathematically, Irifinity can reduce itself to zero. If it actually becomes a zero can it regain its infinity ? There is perhaps a pretty hard probability of it. It is not an impossibility. One can say that something similar has been accepted by the Omnipresent Reality in the creation of the universe.

The Supreme, it seems, has allowed the very opposite of itself to come into being and subjected itself to all that it implies. And now the whole is moving back towards self-recovery in life, step by step. It will recover its own status here because it is essentially Divine and cannot be under the fall for ever. The creation of ego was the fall from the Supreme but it was a necessity for the process of evolution. It was needed because otherwise the Many would not have come into being out of the One. The ego is the self-aware centre in an inconscient world and it feels itself as the centre of the universe. Each ego feeling itself as it were the centre of the universe creates division not only from the Supreme but from each other. This creates disharmony and struggle.

Formation of the ego consciousness, the ego-centric outlook as Sri Aurobindo says here, is only a prelude; it is not the final goal. It is a prelude to something better that has to follow. The formation of the ego is the first act because that brings into existence a self-aware entity, a subjective self, an individual who experiences pain and suffering and duality and death and evil and all kinds of distortions. That

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is the inevitable condition through which evolution has to pass. That creates universal disharmony instead of harmony of the Satchidananda. The progress lies in moving from this ego-centricity into universal consciousness, in this very ego realizing itself as the universal consciousness. When it realizes the universal consciousness the world does not change but the significance of all experience completely changes. When a man lives in the cosmic consciousness the sun does not begin to rise in the west. The accidents, difficulties and troubles and all kinds of conflicts of life and suffering are there but his view of them, his understanding of them undergoes a change. The cognition, the rendering of experience as value, completely changes. So that when something is seen it is not seen as the individual distorting consciousness sees it but as it is to be seen from the cosmic or universal consciousness. Then it is seen quite differently, so differently that it is difficult to convey the idea of it to the individual who doesnot know that one could see so differently the whole range of human experience.

The view of things undergoes a very great change. As discribed in Savitri :

In the worm he sees the coming God.

In the ordinary view the worm is seen only as a worm but the vision of one who has attained the higher consciousness sees in the 'worm' the evolution of a divine being after a long time. The worm is not an isolated item of the universe, it is a link in a long chain in which the Divine Being would find its place.

Even the events that take place change their values to man in course of time. Take the French Revolution as an illustration : one who lived during the Revolution would have felt it as the worst time in human history. Five hundred people

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were being guillotined every day in the Reign of Terror. But if one goes a hundred years forward the view changes. The French Revolution is seen as a great historical event that ushered in the age of democracy and equality all over Europe and subsequently in the world. So, the revolution though it appeared an unmixed evil at the time when it occurred, proved to be a great help to human progress in the long run. What it meant in terms of human progress is so different from what it was felt to be by the contemporaries.

Human ego is to be overpassed in order to enable man to achieve real progress. Pain, suffering, disharmony etc. continue in order that man may seek the radical cure for them. In this regard it is important to note that the scale of human experience is not fixed, it is variable. Heat and cold are relative, they have no fixed absoluteness. So also pain and suffering. We find this truth even in ordinary experience of life. Pain can be transformed into delight, it is only the question of changing the nature of the vibration. The bite of an ant when felt as an attack gives the sensation of pain, but felt as meeting of a consciousness with another consciousness it can become a pleasant contact. This does not mean there is no pain or suffering. It only means that values of ignorance are true in ignorance. And values of the same experience change when the consciousness of man rises to a higher plane. The first appearance, the first evidence of our sense mind is not final; very often the first reaction is not the true reaction. Scientific advance is made possible by not accepting the first evidence of the senses. To the first view the Sun appears going round the earth. But the truth is the other way, the earth is moving round the Sun. In spiritual life also one has not to accept the first movement of nature as true e.g. the ego feeling that it is the centre of the uinverse and that everything has to be judged by reference to it is the first movement; but it is ignorance. That the Satchidananda

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is the central Reality and men and the universe move round it is the Truth to be realized. Man has to attain his true psychological centre by a process of growth of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo puts it very clearly in The Life Divine: "To the egoistic consciousness God seems to be going round the ego and ego sits in judgment on the works of God." The truth is that the Omnipresent Reality is the centre and mind and all its experiences have to find their true significance in the Universal and in the Transcendent Divine. Therefore, to transcend the ego, to transmute all experience into radically different values, a complete trans-valuation of experience is a spiritual necessity.

The question is : is such perfection possible here on earth, —in human life? One can admit the need of the fall into ego as an indispensable condition for creating innumerable points of individuality and then the need of overpassing or dissolving the ego and ascending to a higher consciousness. But is that possible here in life ?

Many believe it is not possible. They try to prove that the law of imperfection is the only law for this world. There are schools of thought that reduce the world to unreality, so that permanent imperfection of life would not mean much in an unreality. Some religions believe that this world is a world of test in which perfection is not intended to be realised. Imperfection, ignorance etc. are all there to test the human soul, they test his faith, his piety, his devotion. If man passes these tests in his life on earth then he would be rewarded in Heaven. Some philosophies assert that the world is an illusion, not a reality. Some religions advocate withdrawal from life as the only solution of the problem of pain; they would suggest the wiping out of Being altogether as the radical remedy.

The question is, is it possible to transcend the ego formation here with all its imperfections by opening the individual

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consciousness to the Universal and to the Divine Consciousness ? It is hard to convince the ordinary mind, though it is not impossible to give a rationale of it because man is a mental being. Sri Aurobindo says : if you tell an ape and try to convince him that a being called man is possible,—man who would have the power of reasoning and judgment, of control over nature,—the ape would not believe it. And if you further try to tell him that not only such a being can exist but would be the result of evolution from the ape kind, he would believe it to be still more impossible.

Man has an advantage over other creatures,—he has got a mind. A monkey cannot conceive the possibility of a more perfect being evolving out of itself. But man can. His mind can conceive a possible perfection. It must be admitted though, that the ordinary man regards the ideal of perfection either as a superstition or an intellectual Utopia, or an act of ideal imagination. As Sri Aurobindo puts it very finely in The Life Divine, to the mind of man, to the reason of man, this possibility of transcending his ego appears to be "an inspiring vision of the impossible".

But it is strange that reason which refuses to admit the possibility of attaining a higher consciousness is all the time trying to go beyond the sense-data that is given to it. The sensation conveyed to the mind is of one kind, the conclusion of reason is quite different. In its pursuit of knowledge reason always transcends what is presented to it.

With regard to psychological problems reason says it is not possible to reject pain or death, etc. But one finds that the impulse of life is not to accept pain as natural. The very instinct of life rejects pain, pain is always felt as something alien. Man is trying to conquer death by conquering diseases. The instinct of life is to feel itself immortal. The difficulty of reason is that it is overcome by apparent fact,

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by appearance of things. In order to solve the problem reason has to grant the possibility of it and not be overcome by the actuality.

Radical solutions of the problems of man are often regarded Utopian. But in considering such a great problem one has to keep the mind open and admit untried possibilities, and undertake risks of experiment in new directions. It is just what man is doing in the realm of physical science. The way in which the mind has to be kept open and plastic is illustrated by Vinoba Bhave's attitude. He has been trying to live upto the ideal of "the world as a family", vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam. He has been preaching it by walking through India on foot. After years of experience of doing the work of preaching the ideal of the world as a family, he has come to accept the possibility of spreading the same idea without resorting to any outer method or means,—without walking long distances on foot or without delivering lectures. He says if somebody could sit down and wake dynamic thoughts within himself it would work. It would be like launching a ballistic missile to its target from a prepared base.

This chapter lays down that the Omnipresent Reality is the basis, the fundamental substance, of the universe; it is dynamic and works from three positions which it simultaneously occupies; the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendent : it is identical at all the three levels. The universe is a movement of evolution from apparent Inconscience to a greater and greater degree of Consciousness. It is a process in the direction opposite to that of involution in which there is a gradual covering of the Reality creating a world, a plane, at every downward step. Man, the mental being, is transitional. He has yet to ascend to a Higher Consciousness beyond mind. This is the great spiritual Odyssey that is now to be consciously undertaken by man.

If material science lays open before man a practically unlimited

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field of adventure and research and experience in the outer interstellar Space, the Supramental is not without similar attractions. The Life Divine is a call to a spiritual adventure, to a spiritual exploration. It initiates a vision of "heights of consciousness which have even been glimpsed and visited but which have yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness". "The highest of these peaks of which the elevated plateaus of consciousness, the Supramental, lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or map of it or any grasp of mental seeing and description." On those unexplored heights there lie inexhaustible treasures of Light, of Power which can effectively help mankind to solve its problems. A call is upon the young today all over the world and it is for them to answer. The Life Divine is not a poetical dream. It is not an abstract construction of mere intellect. It is a discovery that makes available a new source of Knowledge and Power to man. This is what I spoke at Banaras and I wanted to place it here at this point because I think it is important to note the implications of it in the modern context.

This assertion that there is a source of power available to man is not a speculation unrelated to the so-called hard realities of life. It may be seen from a statement of Sri Aurobindo himself about his outer retirement. : "His retirement from outer activity did not mean as most people supposed that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realize the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement he kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively

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intervened whenever necessary but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action. For it is part of the experience of those who have advanced in yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of mind and life and body in matter there are other forces and powers that can and do act from behind and from above. There is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in spiritual consciousness but all do not care to possess, or possessing, to use it and this power is greater than any other and more effective. It was this force which Sri Aurobindo used at first only in a limited field of personal work but afterwards in the constant pressure upon world forces and he had reason to believe that the results were not disappointing."

In his great epic Savitri, he wrote, "This world is a beginning and a base" "where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams". "An unborn power must build Reality". We have already structures created by Life and structures created by Mind in our human life today. It is all right, he says, it is a beginning and a base. Life and Mind create those structures of dreams but if you want to build Reality here, it is only an unborn power that can build the Reality. Supermind brings to birth this Unknown Power. Lest People should think that power is the only aspect of the Truth, I will give what Mother has to say on this problem. "Is the supramental truth-consciousness only power, only knowledge and illumination ? it is much more. Listen to the voice of the maternal Divine Love : "Oh beloved children, sorrowful and ignorant, and thou of rebellious and violent nature, open your hearts, tranquillize your force. It is the Omnipotence of Love that is coming to you."

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