TOWARDS THE LIGHT
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM
First Edition 1938 ... ... 1938
Second Edition 1944 ... ... 1944
Third Edition 1955 ... ... 1955
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I
THERE is a Light before which all other light is darkness. .
There is a Strength before which all other strength is weakness.
There is a Joy before which all other joy is suffering.
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Forward to the Farthest!
Upward to the Highest!
Downward into the Deepest!
At the farthest awaits a humanity fulfilled and realised,
At the highest broods the Divinity that propels and forges,
At the deepest dwells the Instrument - the Individuality - that obeys and executes.
Be aware of these triple elements, house their triple movements;
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Find your one and total self in the dynamic union of the Three: -
This is the gate to fulfillment and harmony and the Spirit's delight in life.
The human in man seeks Divinity, the Divine in man seeks humanity.
Your smallnesses only you can call your own; your greatness is the greatness of the Divine in you.
It is the Godhead in you that can reveal God to you; there is no other proof of God.
What you want to possess absolutely as your own, will also claim to possess you as absolutely its own.
Lose all - and you fall into the bosom of boundless plenitude.
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Sacrifice all but into the radiant fire of Aspiration that flames up to the gods.
The Heart is the blazing hearth of Aspiration, the divine door that opens into Immortality.
Of Love Ananda is the soul, self-mastery the head, and purity the foundation.
The human approaches to the Divine are dangerous. Seek God in God's ways.
Aspire and love . . . Ascending Love leads to Immortality. Descending Love leads to Death. Love is defeated as often as Lust is victorious.
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Love is ascending Ananda that leads to Immortality.
Lust is descending Ananda that leads to Death.
The secret of Love is the joy of self-giving.
The secret of joy is self-giving. If any part in you is without joy, it means that it has not: given itself, it wants to keep itself for itself.
Divine love has an element of detachment which human love has not; and yet Divine love can be as passionate as human love, nay, Divine love has an intensity which human love cannot attain.
It is the element of detachment which intensifies love, because it is this which purifies love.
Detachment means freedom from attachment to the body and to the bodily desires
and, more than that, freedom from attachment to one's own self.
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The love that is thus detached and free makes no demands, for it has no hunger. It is, it exists and therefore possesses the fullness of delight; it can only give itself and ask nothing.
The strongest attachment is the attachment to one's own self - not to what one really is, but to what one has actually become. To remain what one has been in the past or is at present, to refuse to be what one is meant to be - this is human, too human.
The human self must yield, surrender and dissolve itself into the Divine self.
Never seek through your desire-soul the person you love. You invite thereby not only misery to yourself but bring a curse upon one you profess to love.
Place always a space of detachment between yourself and your beloved; make the Divine your mediator.
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This is the secret of the sweetest and most exquisite and intimate relation possible with persons or things, that it should be made and established in and through the Divine.
The closer we come to the Divine, the stricter are the conditions we have to fulfil, the severer grow the tests through which we have to pass.
An absolute and thorough winnowing and cleansing is demanded in him who aspires to be the Divine's favourite.
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II
OF THE DIVINE AND ITS HELP
IT is the Divine alone that is capable of immediate and absolute surrender.
But is there not in the human that which is divine?
Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.
Do not strive and struggle to do. Only be conscious of what is being done for you.
There is a Power that is not grim and violent, but smiling and translucent and yet
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irresistible. It does not give out heat and soot but radiates a soothing and persuasive clarity. It is not the Fire of our earth that burns and bruises, smokes and crackles - it is something like the serene and silent luminousness, the steady and unaging radiance of the distant stars that energises the cosmic symphony.
All activity should carry with it a sense of repose. Doing everything you must feel as if you were doing nothing - even while most energetic, know how to be perfectly at rest.
In the same way, all repose must be filled with intense activity - tranquil and immobile, yet a dynamo of the swiftest and surest energies.
One must know how to wait - calm, patient, unshakable - wait indefinitely, as long as that is demanded, accepting even what looks like defeat.
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Await every moment, with all the concentrated expectancy of an imminent mother-hood, the birth of the Divine in you. Await in calmness, await in breathless readiness.
Silence is the gate through which you enter the Divine. The senses silent, you will sense the Divine. The brain silent, you will understand Him. Your passions silent, you will love Him. Your desires silent, you will possess Him.
The Divine never withdraws from you; it is you who move away from the Divine and Imagine the contrary, as the earth might
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You cannot possess the Divine: your movement must not be a grasping - for, the more you grasp at the Divine the farther will it recede from you. Approach with self- abandonment: the greater the abandonment, the closer to you will you find the Divine.
Tamas means hoarding for oneself, Rajas squandering for oneself: both mean stealing from the Divine.
Sattva is a sharing with the Divine. Neither steal nor share, but give thyself and all to its Divine owner.
Knowledge and power belong to the Divine and are bestowed when and on whom He chooses; covet them not. But devotion and love are man's and by love and (devotion
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Man is the net that Divine Fowler has spread to capture the wide and fleet universal physical Nature, so that through him it may be brought under control, tamed and transfigured.
If you think for yourself or feel for yourself or act for yourself, you become a mis appropriator, a dishonest trustee - a thief of force.
Let the Divine think through you, feel through you and act through you. Then only right and perfect use will be made of the- instruments that compose your being.
Let the Divine's Thoughts shine in your mind, let the Divine's Love swell in your heart, let the Divine's Energy impel your limbs.
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Let the taste of Immortality fill my mouth . . . all mortalities will turn insipid.
A little of Her Grace is sufficient for my little soul; but even if my soul were as big as the entire universe, that self-same little would be more than sufficient to fill it to overflowing.
Thou art the goal, Thou the way.
Thou art Thyself what we have to be; by Thy example Thou showest us how to be.
Thou givest us the power to work and achieve; Thou art That which works and achieves; and that which is achieved in us is Thou.
What is the Truth? The Man who bears the Truth.
Ask me not to test and toil for the Truth: ask me rather to love the Man who bears the Truth.
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WHEREVER you meet a ray of real light, a gleam of genuine beauty, a particle of true truth- go back with it to its original source. Follow the track to the end and you will find yourself in the embrace of the Divine.
Close not your senses-however earthly they may be. Fling them all wide open-open always and everywhere, but to the Divine.
Life itself becomes Art-the very highest form of Art-when it is moulded in the rhythm of the Supreme Beauty, when its steps follow the cadences of the Divine.
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Every softening of the heart towards things of the earth is a hardening of it to the things of Heaven.
Of the host of desires you cherish, not many are really fulfilled; and even these are fulfilled only in a. way.
Not much is lost by not harbouring desires; mostly, it is not enjoyment of desire, but the deceptive pleasure of anticipation that you lose.
Desirelessness brings about a sovereign fulfillment, not of desires, but of the outreaching's of a divine Will in you, of which your desires are the negation.
Desire lost opens the way to the enjoyment of Delight supernal.
There is not much virtue in going down the slope; all can do that-for the natural gravitation of the consciousness is downward He is the hero who resists the temptation to
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The only atonement for a Wrong thing done is to do the right thing on the next occasion.
Tapasya: Never to let yourself slip down, always to maintain your progress up the slope.
Never say, "I cannot." Look more closely, you will find that it means in reality, "I want not."
Each difficulty can be an opportunity for a new progress. For what is meant by a difficulty? A flaw in the nature brought before the consciousness that it may be dealt with and remedied.
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Every apparent Negation is an index to an Affirmation waiting behind it.
You increase your difficulty by thinking it difficult; consider it easy and it will be made easy to you.
Maya is real only because you are unwilling to think it otherwise; once awake from Maya and you will find not only that it is no more, but that it has never been.
Facts by themselves are not great or small; it is the forces behind them that give them their real stature.
Facts have value in so far as they are significant-significant of forces, of dynamic possibilities that work out in and through them.
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Facts in their outward form may even directly contradict the very forces that manifest through them or are embodied in them.
Do not turn back seeing the desert in front. Traverse it with courage and fortitude-for beyond is the promised land flowing with milk and honey.
None is truly weak, not even any limb or element in him. One has only to open to the Universal Power, the Divine Mother; she is the origin and fountain-head of all strength and energy and she can make the mute speak and the lame leap over the mountains.
There is no error that cannot be repaired and even turned to advantage.
There is no loss that cannot be made up and even turned to a greater gain.
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Each fall or failure should be only a drawing back so that you can leap to a greater height-till you reach the summit and fall and fail no more.
Your past has created your present; create by your present the future.
You can not only obliterate the past, but make it even as if it had never been.
As the consciousness rises upwards from the Present and broadens out, it not only creates the Future but also recreates the Past.
Years are not needed to undo the sins of years-a single moment can eflace an age.
A solitary second can be the spark potent to explode a whole past.
A dip into the ocean of Grace and you come
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out clean, shedding all the Past, reborn unto the Future.
A single drop of poison can Vitiate the entire stream of wholesome blood in the body.
But there is too a Purity, a drop of which can render crystal clear a whole morass of soil and dirt.
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IV
TRUTH is Beauty's substance-it is Beauty self-governed.
Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate.
Love is Beauty enjoying itself.
Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates.
Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts.
All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty.
Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with Delight.
The Truth of a thing is its native substance, the being in its absolute self-law. Satyam is that which is of Sat.
Beauty is delight organised.
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Poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech.
Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The nature of the speech shows the nature of the self-consciousness. The degree of perfection in utterance measures also the extent to which one is conscious of oneself.
Beauty is the soul's delight perfectly articulate and organised.
Where the soul does not speak out, where the rhythm of the spirit does not manifest, there comes in ugliness.
Things are ugly when they are not true to themselves, not sincere, not self-expressive.
In a sense, natural and beautiful are the same, the perverse commensurate with the ugly.
Beauty is not merely balance, symmetry, measure, a regular disposition of features. A form, an embodiment, need not be pretty to be beautiful.
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Mere formal beauty is a power, but a surface power; there is a deeper unity of rhythm in the embodiment that is beautiful by its transparent soul-expression.
Art is the incarnation of Truth in Beauty,
The Divine the truest Truth and the Beauty most beautiful,
The incarnation of the Divine the supreme Art.
An art with the Divine left out is like a trunk without the head:
It is built with the lower members and not with the higher members of Beauty;
Skill it may possess but not greatness;
It may please the senses, but cannot enrapture the soul.
The very nature of Art is rhythm and harmony.
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The Divine is integral harmony and perfect rhythm.
The element of divine harmony and rhythm is the measure of the beautiful in Art.
Even so it is with the art of life.
All things are beautiful, for the All-beautiful is in every thing.
The domain of Art encompasses the entire creation.
The Divine is present everywhere, but in essence.
In the manifestation there is a varying and developing degree of the Presence.
The Brahman is there equally in the saint and the sinner, in the knowledge and in the ignorance,-it is the static Brahman.
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The stress of Life is to reveal and incarnate more and more of the dynamic Divine, the creative Ananda of consciousness in its self-nature.
The progress of art too consists in recording this march of the soul in its ever-growing consciousness and ever-deepening Ananda towards a higher incarnation of the Divine.
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V
THE Supreme is infinite, therefore He is also finite.
To be finite is one of the infinite aspects of the Infinite.
Creation is the definition of the Infinite.
All creation is fundamentally an act of self-division.
The multiplicity of the divided selves of the Supreme forms the created universe.
In and through the unnumbered divided selves, the one undivided Self still stands intact and inviolate.
With each successive self-division, the Supreme descends into a more concrete form of creation.
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The Supreme has pulverised himself into the atoms of Matter.
Matter is Spirit divided ad infinitum and infinitely concretised.
Utter Nescience is the focussing of utter Intelligence the farthest away from itself and upon infinite points.
The Soul is a portion of the Divine, enshrined in the heart of the human being; it is the child of the Mahasakti, it is the immortal in mortality, the secret godhead that urges the earthly creature ever forward and upward in the march of evolution, ever expressing and embodying more and more of its inner truth in the actualities of life.
The Self is the Purusa in the individual; it is the consciousness as pure being, simply existent in its own delight, which sees and sanctions all and is yet aloof from the mutabilities of the life becoming.
The Spirit is the Self immanent, universal and transcendent.
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The Supreme Divine is Purusottama,-the Spirit and its expression and its continent, the Sat and the sakti.
The Soul is God's Grace upon Matter; it is the living spark from the Heart of the- Divine, sent down into Matter, in order to lift Matter into Divinity.
The gods are the glories of the Supreme Divine; they are the agents that effect this transmutation and the types that embody the transmuted reality.
The gods are the individualised Name -Forms of the Supreme.
You are always an instrument, a mere tool,. so long as you are in the unconsciousness.
It is when you are conscious that you become an agent.
As long as you are unconscious, you are-mostly an instrument in the hands of the Dark Forces.
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when you become conscious, you are an agent who can act for, and act with, and act as, the gods.
To be conscious means to become aware of the truth of one's nature and to live with the light and the force of that truth.
To be unconscious means to be ignorant of the realities that make one's true nature, to be a mere tool driven and utilized by the forces of Untruth.
To be free and independent does not mean that one lives and moves as one chooses or has the feeling of doing so.
A soul captured in the mind and the life and the body is never free or independent; its sense of freedom or independence is only a make-believe so that Inferior Nature might all the more easily utilise the imprisoned Soul for her own purposes.
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If you happen to be in the way of the Divine Power, either you yield to it and are taken up into its substance and constitution, become an integral part of it, execute in it a special function-
Or, you oppose it and are mowed down and destroyed.
The Dark Power tries to work in the self- same way; but it cannot touch you, even though you oppose it, if from the outset you are armed with the protection of the Divine - Force.
The Dark Power too gives protection to- its devotees, but it cannot maintain them long against the inexorable oncoming of the Divine.
Consciousness is the light that flows from the Truth of existence.
To be conscious means to be aware of the-Truth of one's nature and live and move with the luminous force of that Truth.
Awareness is not a mere passive phenomenon; it is supremely active and dynamic. To be aware means a constant radiation of
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the light of consciousness and by the touch of that light a continuous purification and new-creation.
Consciousness: the movement by which existence goes out of itself and turns back upon itself in order to experience itself.
Will: the selective and realising power of consciousness.
Faith: Certitude born of the soul's secret communion with the Truth.
Faith is the urge of the soul's truth-the truth that has not yet come down and become evident to the reason and the brain-mind.
Faith brings out not only your own latent power,but opens the gates to a Power higher than your own.
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There is no limit to your own power, if you know how to push back this own of yours nearer and nearer to the Divine.
The consciousness seeks in its ordinary movement to lean upon something, something outside itself; alone and within itself it feels a void and is uneasy and short of breath, as if in a rarefied atmosphere.
The Higher Consciousness feels a completeness in itself, is full to the brim with its own reality and needs no going out for materials and objects necessary to fill a vacuity.
Two consciousnesses are there at two extreme and opposing poles-one of the Spirit and the other of Matter. Both are static.
A dynamic consciousness lies between; it joins, harmonises, energises both-it is the Occult Consciousness.
The passage from the world of the Spirit
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to the world of Matter and back lies through the Occult World.
Two godheads are there: one above, the other here below. One is transcendent, the other immanent; one is eternal, infinite, immutable, absolute, the other is of the temporal and in it, wedded to the finite, the changing, the relative; one is sovereignly conscious, the other embedded in the unconscious. One is the godhead that is, the other the godhead that is becoming.
One is the godhead in eternal Truth- mitya, svarupa; the other is the godhead in ever progressive Reality-uyavahara, rupa. Both are one and the same deity. The godhead above, descending, has become the godhead here below ascending to meet again and recover its original nature not there, but here.
Creation is the interaction of these two elemental Powers expressing themselves as Nature-Nature, an Involution and Evolution of the double Divinity.
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Progress is the march of the godhead below towards a triumphant self-revelation; its self- finding is the luminous realisation in itself of the godhead above.
Earth has a consciousness, matter is instinct with an Aspiration; only the consciousness is involved and turned inwards, the Aspiration is mute and knows not itself.
The consciousness is that of a Divinity which has precipitated and taken this material form, the Aspiration is to regain Godhead even in this form of matter, to sublimate itself into that Divinity here and now.
The secret urge of Evolution lies there in the compelling stress of that consciousness and that Aspiration.
In so far as man embodies in himself and gives expression in his terrestrial life to this consciousness and Aspiration, to that extent is he in line with the march of Evolution and fulfills his high destiny.
Religion is a worship of lesser gods; often, even, it is the worship of beings that are not
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gods at all but pose as gods, simulating their truth, usurping their status, acting arbitrarily in their divine name and aping their authority.
The pseudo-gods are not always evil, nor do they lead men only to perdition: their worship may often be useful, even salutary. But what these beings will not allow is to let man pass beyond a given frontier; they will not suffer him to rise in the scale of consciousness higher than a certain limit. Any attempt or turn towards a transcending of that limit they watch with jealous Vigilance and suppress it with vehemence, even with violence. Within their domain, subject to their dharma, they accord to their worshippers prosperity and power, sometimes perhaps even a certain elevation of consciousness.
The lesser gods and the pseudo-gods are none other than the various forces that reign in the world of the mental, the vital or the physical consciousness. These are the three planes that, in the cosmic as well as in the
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To go beyond all the dharmas of this three-fold Lower Nature, attain to the Truth- Consciousness of the Fourth Status, incarnate in all that we are, know, will, feel and do the Law or Dharma of the Spirit and of the Spirit alone, is what we mean by Spirituality.
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VI
THE Divine is All-Light, All-Bliss, All- Power-in himself, in his essence and true being, always and for ever.
But, somewhere, in a part of universal being the Divine chose to forget the Divine, a veil was allowed to interpose in front of the All-Light, the All-Bliss, the All-Power:
A mixture became possible, the dualities were born-
Ignorance entered into Knowledge, Pain invaded Delight, Weakness stole into Strength.
For a new and extraordinary manifestation this movement was permitted, for the fullness of experience, for an immense contradiction turning to a luminous reconciliation and harmony.
The Eternal negated his eternity, the Divine became the undivine.
Out of the inconscient Consciousness had to arise, Light out of darkness, Bliss out of
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suffering, Power out of inertia,-for the Divine is still the only reality, even in the appearances. that are its opposite.
That which is undivine had to become an instrument of divinity, inconscient Matter to embody the Supreme.
For when the One Divine descended into the multiplicity of manifestation, when he cast out of himself an infinitely varied and graded existence, the undivine too became a possibility-an aspect, an appearance the farthest away from his original and highest status.
All possibilities are manifested in the Infinite and this line of descent too had to be followed to its uttermost, the entire range of its possibility to be exhausted, negated in its own realisation and brought back to the nature and substance of its Source.
The beginning of creation is self objectivisation.
The Divine put himself away from himself -"went abroad"-that he might contemplate
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himself, that he might establish a system of infinite relations with himself.
Manifestation-Lila-is the working out of this complex of self-objectivisation.
In the processus of this self-objectivisation the possibility of a movement of denial of self became in appearance inevitable-denial of self showed itself as the extreme limit, the final term of self-objectivisation.
The Divine permitted to himself self-annihilation that he might pass through it to the completest self-realisation.
In the Spirit there is only Light.
But the Shadow was allowed here below -for it was the vehicle in which the spiritual Light had to be embodied, to be made real in Matter and by Matter and as Matter.
Where there is the utmost Denial, there was to arise the very perfection of the Affirmation of the Divine.
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