Lecture I
Chap. 1. The Human Aspiration
Chap. 2. The Two Negations : The Materialist Denial
When I first read the Life Divine it came as a great intellectual architecture and I thought it was so, perhaps, because I was so much impressed by it. But later on I met Dr. S. K. Maitra who first came to pay his respects to Sri Aurobindo in Pondi-cherry, and he did not come as a disciple. He came as a devotee and an admirer. I asked him how it was that a philosopher like him was so taken up with The Life Divine and how was it that he got the conviction from The Life Divine. He said : "As a young man in college I was faced with the alternative of choosing a voluntary subject; I wanted to know the Reality, the ultimate Truth. But I wanted to know it only by my intellect, by my mind. I did not want to give up my mind and accept anything. So, with that object I chose philosophy as my voluntary subject; I believed that in philosophy all human minds have tried to know the Reality, know the Truth, know whatever is the Ultimate and have tried to formulate it in terms of mind. And I went through all of them." In fact he was a very sincere student of philosophy, one of the rare type. Philosophy now has become a profession, and also a career. There are philosophers and philosophers. There are philosophers who are careerists, there are philosophers who are interested in ideas and philosophers who seek promotion through their work and philosophers who form coteries. But to seek the Truth through philosophy is now a very rare phenomenon and I found Dr. Maitra an exception among philosophers. Because he told me that when he was studying the philosophers, he read them in the original language so as not to miss anything that they had to say. He said he found
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some truth in all the great philosophies. The philosophers had perceived a Truth, a Reality and given it a logical form and system. There were differences among them but he could see that they had felt a Reality, a Truth but the nature of that Reality was not clear to him across their differences.
"When The Life Divine The Life Divine was published in the book form in 1939, I went through it like a student preparing for this examination. I read it at a stretch, I could not leave it. When I had finished reading I said to myself: it was good that I took philosophy. Here is somebody who allows full freedom to my intellect, answers all my questions and builds up a picture of Reality which no other philosopher has ever done. I could stand on my intellect and look at the Reality he points out and know its functions, its relation to man, to mind, to life, to the universe. It is an intellectual architecture like an ivory tower, solid and beautiful, having the golden coping of the Supermind which satisfied me. I know, intellectually, now why the world exists, why man is here, why matter is and what man has to attain in life. That is why I have come to pay my respects to the great teacher who satisfied my fife-long seeking."
This aspect of The Life Divine that Dr. S. K. Maitra described struck me as something great. And since then, whenever I have thought about this problem I have looked upon The Life Divine as the harbinger of a new age. I have spoken already of the nature of this New Age in one of my talks at Sedona, but I again say that The Life Divine is the declaration which ushers in a new age for humanity. It is the dawn of a new age, an age in which man will consciously go beyond the attained formula of his nature, an age in which man will establish in himself, by constant effort of individual and groups, a new faculty which has not yet become constantly active in humanity, a faculty which is greater than Mind, which is self-existent knowledge, in which knowledge and will are not
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divided and where Truth is not a stranger. That faculty will be established in mankind when the Dawn of the new age has actually worked out what it signifies, what it means. But this work has already established the necessity of the new age and gives the rationale of it. It is like a vast architecture in which you walk from room to room and forget the room which you left and even may lose your way. It is like the labyrinth through which you are led to a solution of the labyrinth. And you walk down and you ask : where was it that I was lost ? And what did he prove ? And what did he disprove ? It is a very complex structure,—very rich, very detailed and the arguments and the logic with which it deals are so subtle, so wide and so radical that one is required to readjust, sometimes, one's mind in order to catch fully all that The Life Divine
The first thing that strikes you is that it does not speak of divine life but of "Life Divine". So the insistence at the dawn of that new age is on "Life",—and the possibility of its transformation. Life human is there, the book establishes the possibility of the transformation of life-human into The Life-divine. The insistence is on life which is a term of expression of the Divine. That is how we look at this great book. It wants to take hold of life, consider life as the main element to deal with. And it tries to show how life can be turned into divine life. Now the fact that he points out is that this life as manifested in man has an aspiration. Life as manifested on earth and in the human being, in humanity—as a group and individuals-has an aspiration for perfection. And this aspiration for perfection is contradicted by the actual experience. Man feels the need of perfection; necessarily, he aspires for perfection, but in actual life he does not attain perfection. The actual life contradicts his aspiration and therefore there are people who say : one should not try to
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the theory and not quite complete in its scope or composed on a preconceived and well-ordered plan it was not published in book-form and is therefore not yet available to the reading public. It was accompanied by a number of renderings of the hymns of the Rig Veda which were rather interpretations than translations and to these there was an introduction explanatory of the "Doctrine of the Mystics". Subsequently there was planned a complete translation of all the hymns to Agni in the ten Mandalas which kept close to the text; the renderings of those hymns in the second and sixth Mandalas are now published in this book for the first time as well as a few from the first Mandala. But to establish on a scholastic basis the conclusions of the hypothesis it would have been necessary to prepare an edition of the Rig Veda or of a large part of it with a word by word construing in Sanskrit and English, notes explanatory of important points in the text and justifying the interpretation both of separate words and of whole verses and also elaborate appendices to fix firmly the rendering of key-words like ṛtaṁ, śravas, kratu, ketu,
This is a literary and not a strictly literal translation,
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But a fidelity to the meaning, the sense of the word? and the structure of the thought, has been preserved : in fact the method has been to start with a bare and scrupulously exact rendering of the actual language and adhere to that as the basis of the interpretation; for it is only so that we can find out the actual thoughts of these ancient mystics. But any rendering of such great poetry as the hymns of the Rig Veda, magnificent in their colouring and images, noble and beautiful in rhythm, perfect in their diction, must, if it is not to be a merely dead scholastic work, bring at least a faint echo of their poetic force—more cannot be done in a prose translation and in so different a language. The turn of phrase and the syntax of English and Vedic Sanskrit are poles asunder; to achieve some sense of style and natural writing one has constantly to turn the concentrated speech of the Veda into a looser, more diluted English form. Another stambling-block for the translator is the ubiquitous double entendre marking in one word the symbol and the thing symbolised, Ray and Cow, clear light of the mind and clarified butter, horses and spiritual power; one has to invent phrases like the "herds of the light" or "the shining herds" or to use devices such as writing the word horse with a capital H to indicate that it is a symbolic horse that is meant and not the common physical animal; but very often the symbol has to be dropped, or else the symbol has to be kept and the inner meaning left to be understood;1 I have not always used the same phrase though always keeping the same sense, but varied the translation according to the needs of the passage. Often I have been unable to find an adequate English word which will convey the full connotation or colour of the original text; I have used two words instead of one or a phrase or resorted to some other device to give the exact and complete meaning. Besides, there is often a use of antique words or turns of
1 The Rishis sometimes seem to combine two different meanings in the same word; I have occasionally tried to render this double sense.
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become perfect, because it will always be impossible. The perfection of the ideal will be there and man's imperfection will always be here. Therefore this aspiration for perfection is unattainable. It is there to make you restless, to make you feel that you have to do something but you never arrive at what you think you must do. Perfection will never be attained. This is one of the difficulties. And they say that the present constitution of man is such that he cannot become perfect. His mind, his senses, his body—all that is given to him, the knowledge that he has is so limited that you cannot expect with his present instrumentation that man could become perfect. How can man become perfect with his body, his sense, his mind, his emotions, his impulses, his desires, his ego—all these, how can they lead him to perfection ?
Sri Aurobindo by way of answering asks us to look at Nature. There you find that when you find something contradictory, an idea which is perfect and an actuality which is imperfect, that is itself Nature's method of working out an ultimate harmony. You cannot say that because it is contradicted now by actual experience therefore it is impossible. Man has progressed by trying to create harmony between that perfection and the actuality. He has always moved like that. When nature presents man with a contradiction it means that he has to solve it, and has not to be satisfied with it. If man is satisfied with contradiction as he finds it, he does not progress. The present contradiction cannot therefore be taken to be final. At one time the mastery over Nature was inconceivable but now man has actually established it. It was impossible to cross the sea. It has now become possible to cross the sea. It was impossible to fly in the air. It has now become possible to fly in the air. It was impossible to drive a vehicle without a horse or a bullock. It has become possible to do so now. So, it only means that man has to evoke faculties, powers, capacities in him, in order to attain
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the perfection which he envisages. It is not that he is condemned to remain confined to his present constitution. He has to evoke powers, faculties, capacities of mind, of life, of search, of discovery, of reason and try to find out. He cannot rest at his present level. Movement toward perfection is possible.
Now, that brings the question as to how life has come into being. Is life the result of Matter, of the Inconscient Energy ? Life seems to arise from the inconscient energy, and this life again gives rise to Mind. Why should the Inconscient give rise to something that is conscious, unless, as he says, you accept that when life comes out of matter, or the inconscient, it was involved already there in some form of potentiality, in some form of itself. Life must have been there in the inconscient matter. It is then that it can come into being. Mind, when it comes out of Life, must have been in matter already involved before evolution from matter to life, from life to mind could take place. Then he says, the question what is life matter is not settled. People believed at one time that the scientists could explain what is matter. It was I think fifty years back in the last century that the scientists actually said and claimed that they would reveal what matter is because matter is something which they can know, they would know and they did know. Spirit, they did not accept, consciousness they did not believe in. Soul they had no proof of, God was far from their acceptance. They said : these things we do not know, man imagines these things; these are subjective. But the world is objective, Matter is something objective and we can know matter because we can touch it, see it, weigh it, subject it to experiment, and to change and then note the processes and the results. We can deal with matter as it is under our control. Matter we accept because our senses bear evidence of the existence of matter. We can find out its constitution and reveal what is matter. Now at the end of one
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hundred and fifty years of research and discovery the scientists are as far from telling us what matter is as they were at the beginning of the century. They have told us how matter behaves or what we can do with the processes of matter. It is true they have revealed many processes. They have given us hypotheses, one after another, but they have not told us what matter is.
It might be, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, that matter is a form of veiled life. And what again is life ? Life perhaps, as he says in The Life Divine,
So the aspiration then gains a certain validity. Aspiration becomes justifiable. Matter is veiled life, life veiled action or form of consciousness and mind is veiled form of something beyond mind feeling the need of perfection, immortality, God or Light, freedom. Now you can say, if you look at the process of growth that seems to have taken place, that man has evolved from the animal consciousness. In fact, he says in The Life Divine, that "animal is the laboratory in which Nature has worked out man. Then man himself can be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation, Nature wills to work out God or to manifest God".
Man, and his reason or intelligence cannot order or beg Nature to stop at a certain stage. He cannot say to Nature : you cannot go beyond. At a given stage of evolution we cannot
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condemn her as perverse, or call it a disease or a hallucination when we find that Nature through man is trying to give evidence of her intention to go beyond, or makes an actual effort to go beyond the present formula which is man. If the materialists find a phenomena which they cannot explain at the time scientifically they say it is a mistake, or a hallucination, or a superstition, or humbug. Even the best and most advanced scientists have become wedded to their own way of thinking like the pandits or the superstitious people or the religious bigots.
Actually this happened to Sir William Crooks, a great scientist in England in the last century. Sir William Crooks wanted to demonstrate certain phenomena of supra-rational causation to the Royal Society of Scientists in England. And the Society unanimously refused to look at the phenomena because science cannot encourage or understand or accept phenomena which are not subject to their way of looking at things. Sir William Crooks argued and tried to persuade the Society that he was not explaining anything. He told them that he had no explanation for the phenomena but the phenomena took place on the material plane and as they were dealing with the material plane and physical phenomena, it was within their right to take cognizance of what was happening. They refused. It was then that he was compelled to start the Psychic Research Society of London. There were eminent intellectuals and scientists who joined that body. The medium of the phenomena was a lady who used to be possessed by a vital being, and that vital being was capable of handling material things in such a way as to defy all the laws of physical science. The lady was lifted out of her chair to the ceiling directly without any intervening medium. There are so many facts which he recounts in his first report of the Psychic Research Society of London. It only shows that man cannot stop Nature at a
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certain stage and condemn everything that defies the tenants of physical science.
Now, to some extent the scientists have begun to learn about these phenomena in the realm of what they call parapsychology. They have been admitting the necessity of going beyond strictly material evidence by positing the possibility of things which happen beyond the range of senses by calling it para-psychology. It is a good admission and the first opening of a gate, perhaps, which will flood all their so-called limited knowledge and carry away the limitations in which they want to confine the knowledge of man only to Matter and to processes evolved by scientists.
There are standpoints that insist on utility and practicability as the most important elements of life. Such questions as perfection, God, consciousness are regarded as impractical. But we know that Nature in the inconscient world tries to bring about changes haphazardly and with lot of waste. So, we should not say: we shall not seek anything more. We should be prepared for change in our own nature. Sri Aurobindo says that the way out is to accept what Nature is trying to do haphazardly in the human being and organise the knowledge of the process of self-exceeding and help Nature in her work by conscious cooperation. One can begin by accepting the possibility in case one finds it rational. The Life Divine gives the rationale.
Now in the second chapter the opposition between Spirit and Matter is dealt with. There is an opposition between Spirit and Matter; and there is belief that the Spirit inhabits this bodily mansion. It is the Spirit that is really the living entity in the cosmos. And then the question is what is Matter. If we look at the problem as a whole then we have to admit that Matter is a fit and noble material which the Spirit weaves constantly as his own garb. He says in The Life Divine
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ending series of his own mansions". Matter is therefore in one sense a noble and fit material for the Spirit to make a garb for himself, to build his own multiple unending series of mansions. In fact the Upanishads declared long ago : "Matter itself is Brahman. Matter is the infinite." Matter is not Inconscient. When man speaks of them—Matter and Spirit—as though they were in opposition they forget that they are the two ends of the one indivisible Reality. At one end the human mind senses the Spirit, at the other end it senses Matter. There is an ascending series by which one seems to the human mind and sense to pass over into the other. But there is no contradiction, Matter itself is the spirit involved, or with a mask, so to say; and Spirit is holding all the potentialities of Matter within itself. There is a complete indivisible series from Matter to Spirit: Matter to Life, to Mind, to Supermind, to the Spirit is a graded scale or a hierarchy.
Some say the pure Spirit is real but Matter is mechanical, inert, unconscious, therefore unreal. Not knowing the hierarchy which connects one with the other and ignorant of the truth that God is immanent already in Nature, they put God and Nature in opposition to each other; God, Supremely Conscious Nature, absolutely inconscient. Now Sri Aurobindo says that if you accept this opposition of God versus Nature; then if you turn to God, you turn away from Nature. Accept Nature then you deny God. Thus you arrive at the exclusion so to say, not to the harmony and the reconciliation.
There are spiritual people, who believe the Spirit as the only Reality. To them the Absolute is the Real. The materialist, on the contrary, denies the Spirit and to him Matter alone is real. He denies the reality of the Spirit and affirms the reality of Matter only. To deny the spirit, to deny consciousness is easy, for the materialist the task is comparatively easy because matter is overpoweringly evident to the senses.
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For a thorough materialist to prove the reality of Matter is a simple process. He can say Matter is real and Force is real. But if you ask him what is Matter or what is Force then he will be compelled to say it is unknowable; it is something which he does not yet know but which he believes is real. Sri Aurobindo shows in this chapter that a reconciliation and a synthesis is possible. They are not two opposites in contradiction at work; the contradictions are only in the mind. Spirit and Matter being the extreme ends of the Reality carry a sense of concreteness to the human being. But the intermediate terms of the series cannot satisfy ultimately the sense of Reality in man. There are systems of thought that want man to rest with some working of Life-force, others propound some mental ultimate. But they can hardly inspire for long the human Spirit because it longs for something concrete. The systems of thought that posit an Unknowable or advocate an agnostic attitude would not satisfy man's seeking. Such philosophies take as final man's present nature.
They do not admit that man can develop in himself, evolve into himself, other instruments of knowledge and consciousness. If you take man as fixed in his present psychological constitution then naturally many things are impossible for him. But as in trying to find the potentiality of Matter man did not limit the field of experiment and experience, the same holds good for his mental and vital consciousness. One should not arbitrarily say that certain things cannot happen. One must leave the field open for experiment and experience. What is this whole universal energy ? One would say it is unknowable, something that you cannot know. A boundless movement is at work on various planes, a complex movement,—on the plane of mind, on the plane of matter, on the plane of life—millions and millions of forces are at work. Now what is this Unknowable which cannot be
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The Author
known ? Sri Aurobindo says it escapes description and that is at present unknowable but it may be attainable. You may know it not by mind but by attaining it. It is possible therefore to take up an attitude in which the denial of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic are both reconciled. The denial of the materialist exists powerfully in European culture. The refusal of the ascetic was powerful in cultures like the Indian where the Spirit was accepted as Reality and life was dubbed at one time an illusion.
If one sees from the intellectual the rational standpoint, then both Matter as well as Spirit are unknowable. Mind does not know Matter; mind cannot know Spirit. And if the materialist proceeds on the premise that the present constitution is the only possible constitution of man, that the sole means available are physical senses and the reason, and if one confines himself to that, then of course there is no solution. If you are tempted to go beyond your sense and your reason then you are told that it is not possible. What to do with those faculties and powers which are more powerful than the senses, more powerful than reason ? How can we, all the time, negate the possibility of developing faculties and powers which are more powerful than our senses and more effective than our reason ? That is the question. And therefore the evoking of faculties and powers potential but dormant now in man, is a necessary condition to man's solving his own problems. The latent faculties which are in all human beings are not the special privilege of only a particular class or of individuals. They are possible and potential in all mankind.
To prove the existence and working of those new faculties there is a vast field of evidence. It is not as if you are called upon to accept superstition or mere imagination. Facts are there which hit one on the head, which one cannot refuse to accept. I mean the phenomenon of hypnotism or telepathy
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or thought-communications or cure by will or transference of will from one point to another or knowing somebody's thought; these phenomena occur. Even what you call reading the future, the phenomenon of prophecy, takes place, or a correct apprehension of things before they happen, either by a subtle vital perception or dream. Dream communication has actually preceded the actual occurrence on the physical plane. So that there are a number of facts which are there to show that there are dormant faculties in man. These are not spiritually the highest faculties but these definitely prove that the present sense-apparatus and reason are not the only instruments available to man. And there are facts and things that happen actually on the physical plane which prove the existence and action of these faculties.
Sri Aurobindo is so synthetic in his outlook that he admits that even this rationalistic attitude or rational materialism has rendered a great service to spirituality itself in the sense that it has tried to make the path clear, to organise the whole effort and refuse to accept superstition and imagination and wishful thinking. He admits that a clear, pure and disciplined intellect is necessary even for spiritual life. And this is a great admission by Sri Aurobindo and he kept to it most faithfully throughout his life. How a pure and disciplined intellect, a great balance in the mind is necessary even for true spiritual life is examplified in Sri Aurobindo's own life. In 1920, when I met him for the second time I asked him: "What are you waiting for ?"—for, the Divine Consciousness was already there in him. He never wanted to declare his divinity. The answer he gave was characteristic of his impersonality and wonderful balance of mind. He said: "The divine is there, but the divine consciousness has yet to descend into and transform the whole of nature and until the physical is transformed the work of the Divine is not done." Anyone else, less capable than he, would have run away with the certitude,
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'the Divine is there, everything is done'. But the pure disciplined intellect can perceive how much more is yet to be done.
The same balance and impersonality marked his silent spiritual help during the Second World War. To me he appeared the living example of how the Divine silently helps the world. Nobody in the world knew anything about it. We know something about it because we were near him. But it was some years afterwards (when the War was over)—that he made a mention of it in order to bring home to the human mind the possibility of using other powers and forces than the physical and the material. He never claimed any personal credit for it, and he had clarity of vision to note that it was not the Supramental that was working but the Divine Consciousness through the Overmind instrument. If the supreme Supermind intervened the result would be immediate success of the Divine Will without any chance for intervening possibilities. Even the Overmind is a powerful force and when it acts in a complex of forces it is strong enough to mould events, it can drive the course of events to the divinely intended direction and bring the success of the Divine Will near in time.1
The Overmind can do it because it is a cosmic power and more than a cosmic power. The Upanishad admitted not only the Brahman but also the earth as the basis of manifestation. The Upanishad says : Earth is the foothold of the Spirit; it is that on which it stands. What is this universe ? If you
1 A professor in a letter expresses surprise that some disciples worship Sri Aurobindo. The question is: Should one accept the Divine when one finds him ? Why should one refuse the Divine when one finds him ? It is often egoism and vanity that refuses to accept the Divine when he is found. He never wanted worship—if anything, he was the most reticent person one could find. There is, nothing wrong in sincere worship offered to the Divine in whatever form,—on the contrary, it is a great spiritual help.
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look at this universe you will find that it is a symbol of an unknowable Reality, an appearance of some unknowable Reality. And when that unknowable Reality becomes real to you, you cannot put it in terms of mind. You cannot express it in language. The first necessity is you must have a universal outlook and you must not have a narrow vision. If you look at each tree, you miss the forest. So, you look at the whole thing then you see it as some unknowable Reality.
But when that unknowable becomes Real, you cannot express it, you cannot put in thought or terms of speech. What does one mean when one says the thing is unknowable ? Does it mean absolutely unknowable ? No. It only means : not knowable by thought, not knowable by reason, not knowable by speech. You cannot put it within the field of thought. It is outside the field of thought and perhaps covers thought but you cannot bring it in and include it in thought, reason, and speech. If the consciousness makes an effort, it can attain that which is unknowable to thought, unknowable to mind, unknowable to senses, unknowable to speech. It is consciousness that must make the effort, because consciousness is not only mind, consciousness is not only body, consciousness is not only senses. Consciousness is that which uses the mind, the life, the nervous system, it uses the body. Now, if that consciousness makes an effort then that which to the mind, to the senses and to the speech is unattainable, can be attained. There is no reason why it should not be attained by an effort of consciousness, But suppose consciousness acts and attains the Reality, what is the sign ? What is the sign it has attained ? What is the positive proof that consciousness by making a great effort,—by concentration, development, enlargement, expansion, widening, etc.,— attains that unknowable Reality, how does one know it ? The proof of the pudding is in the taste, in the eating of it. When one has attained the Reality there is complete
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revaluation of life. For instance, before he attains it man is ignorant, when he attains it he knows. Ramakrishna Parama-hansa, an unlettered villager who could not sign his name even in Bengali language, when he attains That he has a knowledge which is far more than any university scholar. So that which is attainable is proved by instances where one who attains undergoes a radical transformation and there is a revaluation of his whole individual life. The way in which he looked at the world before and the way in which he perceives it after are not the same. That is what makes the difficulty of spiritual persons. For instance, somebody says, "This man is bad". The spiritual man says, "There is a bad tendency in Nature; there is no bad man. Universal nature has some tendency which is low. That's all." And there are so many things like that. There is revaluation, the way of looking from the spiritual point of view is absolutely different because once you contact that Reality the individual constitution undergoes a change and there is a revaluation of the whole apparatus of man's cognizance of things. He acts and perceives differently. Even there Sri Aurobindo says he must keep his intellect clear. He must have a clear, pure and disciplined intellect even when there has been a revaluation. Sri Aurobindo never looked at the world as people do but when anybody met him he found him a perfect gentleman, very nice, very polite. They never could know that they had met a person who lived in the Divine, in the supreme Reality. Some might find it, in fact, many felt, who had never believed in God. Yes, but he never said anything. And the most surprising part of it is that in 1918 when I was in Pondicherry, a lady, junior, to him in age, Saraladevi Choudhurani, came to see him. I was sitting there at one corner and when she came Sri Aurobindo got up from his chair as a sign of respect for her. I was surprised. She was a very good public worker. But he was senior in age and entitled to respect.
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When you attain that consciousness, you should also keep a perfect balance. You don't lose anything of ordinary values of life and you know what is proper and what is improper.
The divine manifestation is a harmony, not a dazzling and inexplicable miracle. It is not something extraordinary and queer. It is an ordered rhythm of divine life that has to be brought into life. An ordered rhythm which is irresistible; you can create that only by living that life inside and by disciplining the whole instrumentation to manifest the Divine only. That is the necessity. A revolution of the inner and perhaps that of the outer life. Sri Aurobindo says : the unknowable is not the unattainable. To the Unknowable there are always faculties in man that correspond by which it can be known. When we say something is unknowable that means we have to bring into existence capacities by which it can be known. There is a subtle universe as there is the gross. He says in his epic 'Savitri' that "this world is a fragment and a residue." It is a fragment of the whole and the residue of the process. Man who is the epitome of the world contains within him elements of the whole, therefore all the contours and curvatures of the whole are in him. He is the residue and in the residue all the elements of the whole process are present. There are powers in the fragment and the residue that make it possible to attain the unknowable. Only man is not compelled to develop all these faculties. He has voluntarily to choose to develop them or not. You are quite free. Nobody compels. That's what I told the boys at Lake Tahoe. One of the questions the boys had put was :— What is God ? So I told them : I give you one definition of God : God is the greatest democrat I have ever known because he never interferes into anybody's affair. He leaves you alone. He interferes only when you vote for him, when you choose him. In the same way one is free to awaken and develop the faculties or not. If you awaken them then there is a discipline, there is a work to be done, a hard work to be done, but the reward is great.
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Questions and Answers
Q : Isn't it only the will (grace) of the Lord and Mother that chooses ?
A : No, there are two parts of sadhana,—spiritual effort. The yogic life in Sri Aurobindo's path is divided into two parts : the personal effort and the Divine Grace. Personal effort is to be done by the individual and not by the Divine; aspiration, rejection and surrender are within the field of the individual effort. But to bring perception, to develop power, to give him the Truth, to give him the cosmic consciousness, to give him the experience of the transcendent consciousness, to give him the transformation, to bring the four-fold transformation and all the perfection of the Divine Power, is the work of the Divine Grace. That one cannot claim. One cannot say :"I did sadhana therefore I must have grace." The Divine is not interested in you as such; He has to do some work and he can utilise a Churchill, or a Roosevelt, if it suits Him, to carry some work through. But the advantage of the yogic life is the consciousness of the Divine grace. One is in contact while a great Churchill may not be in contact. He is ignorant while a yogi can be a man of knowledge whose small work for the divine done consciously is greater than the work which Churchill does unconsciously for the Divine. The unconscious work of a Churchill is good from the divine point of view, for the world but this work which the yogi does is necessary to raise the world to the Divine. Man has awakened only his reasoning faculty and developed his sciences to-day but when he is tired of it, perhaps, he will try to go into other fields and perhaps then he will find that there are realms of experience possible to
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him in other fields than material science. And that is a good sign because this materialism or the practical reason and the scientific attitude today is trying to acquire knowledge, more and more knowledge. That means it is trying to know the truth; by knowledge it means knowledge of Truth. And it goes on trying to acquire more and more knowledge. This very push will carry it beyond the limits of Matter, as they came to atom-fission all of a sudden. They kept on pushing, pushing, suddenly they found that even in Matter there is a power which they did not think was possible in it. This very push of trying to know more will take them beyond the limits of scientific effort. Today, even materialistic intellect believes in monism, (advaita) of Matter : Matter alone exists. They forget that Matter is a formation of some unknown force and we will find that it is not only Matter but it is energy. There is one energy at bottom; it firmly establishes itself in three forms : Matter, another Life, third Mind. One energy one seed, He manifests in many ways : In many ways it multiplies. So one cosmic energy manifests itself in triple form. That same energy takes the form of matter or material energy, takes the form of life and life-energy, takes the form of mind and mind-energy. And when you say energy, it is a conscious power. It cannot be unconscious energy which takes form in life and mind, particularly. This energy has a will. This will in man becomes will for infinite life, will for absolute or unlimited knowledge. This very energy now finds expression in man's mind, in his mental energy. In the life of man this energy wants to attain infinite life, infinite delight. This infinite energy, when it manifests itself in mind wants to attain perfect knowledge. It wants to attain a kind of perfection which it has not yet attained. So it is that will which is trying to work out through the triple form and attain some end which is intended for it. And this very will is working through science,—
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through material sciences. Science is now trying to control life; in many countries Governments have introduced birth-control. Doctors are trying to eliminate disease. This will is already working towards a kind of conquest though the agents who do the work are not conscious of it and which, if it becomes conscious in man, must sooner or later lead him to the opening of a new faculty and a new consciousness. A terrestrial omnipotence for humanity is the aim of the mastery of Matter. Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine that the scientist is trying to create for man a terrestrial omnipotence. In fact, man has become omnipotent so far as the earth is concerned. He can destroy germs, he can destroy animals, he can destroy vegetation, he can fly to other bodies in the heavens. He has become for practical purposes the ruler of the earth and so there is actually the terrestrial omnipotence for humanity today. Humanity is omnipotent so far as the earth is concerned. It can do what it likes—only the nations go on fighting with each other, otherwise it can just do what it likes to to do, today. While this has not come into being yet it has advanced so far that space and time have been reduced to the vanishing point. You start on the 20th and go to a place on the 19th ! Even science has done it, it wants to make man the master of circumstances and to make him outgrow his limits,—to overcome causality, if he can. Of course, he does not do it individually. Today scientific research is done in collective groups. It is not possible for an individual to do it. Collectivity must take advantage of scientific progress and apply it so that it is now the result of the groups. An individual is only a means to make this collective progress possible. But this scientific will or this will to increase knowledge in the collectivity— is it conscious ? In the collective, it is not conscious. The group does not think of scientific progress. The group only takes hold of the advantage which the individual gives
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to it by progressing. So this will is not conscious in the collectivity of mankind but something beyond the collectivity is dictating. And this cosmic impulse to increase knowledge is what the modern scientist is serving without knowing—the cosmic impulse to make man realise the omnipotent power, and rule the terrestrial life. And this the modern scientist is trying to do without knowing it.
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