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Sri Aurobindo
Life Divine
What is Life Divine?
(433) The Life divine
Altruism, philanthropy and service, Christian love
or Buddhist compassion have not made the world a whit happier,
they only give infinitesimal bits of momentary relief here and
there, throw drops on the fire of the world's suffering. All aims
are in the end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying
or evanescent; all works are so much labour of effort and success
and failure which consummate nothing definitive: whatever
changes are made in human life are of the form only and these
forms pursue each other in a futile circle; for the essence of life,
its general character remains the same for ever. This view of
things may be exaggerated, but it has an undeniable force; it is
supported by the experience of man's centuries and it carries in
itself a significance which at one time or another comes upon the
mind with an overwhelming air of self-evidence.
(1008)
In the lower grades of gnostic being, there would be a limitation of self-expression
according to the variety of the nature, a limited perfection in
order to formulate some side, element or combined harmony of
elements of some Divine Totality, a restricted selection of powers
from the cosmic figure of the infinitely manifold One. But in the
supramental being this need of limitation for perfection would
disappear; the diversity would not be secured by limitation but
by a diversity in the power and hue of the Supernature: the
same whole of being and the same whole of nature would express
themselves in an infinitely diverse fashion; for each being
would be a new totality, harmony, self-equation of the One
Being. What would be expressed in front or held behind at any
moment would depend not on capacity or incapacity, but on the
dynamic self-choice of the Spirit, its delight of self-expression,
on the truth of the Divine's will and joy of itself in the individual
and, subordinately, on the truth of the thing that had to be done
through the individual in the harmony of the totality. For the
complete individual is the cosmic individual, since only when
we have taken the universe into ourselves and transcended it
can our individuality be complete.
The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing
and feeling all as himself would act in that sense; he would act
in a universal awareness and a harmony of his individual self
with the total self, of his individual will with the total will, of his
individual action with the total action.
(1011)The gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge
of what is to be willed and the power to effectuate its
knowledge; it will not be led from ignorance to do what is
not to be done.
Moreover, its action is not the seeking for a
fruit or result; its joy is in being and doing, in pure state of
spirit, in pure act of spirit, in the pure bliss of the spirit. As
its static consciousness will contain all in itself and must be,
therefore, for ever self-fulfilled, so its dynamis of consciousness
will find in each step and in each act a spiritual freedom and
a self-fulfilment. All will be seen in its relation to the whole,
so that each step will be luminous and joyous and satisfying
in itself because each is in unison with a luminous totality. This
consciousness, this living in the spiritual totality and acting from
it, a satisfied totality in essence of being and a satisfied totality
in the dynamic movement of being, the sense of the relations of
that totality accompanying each step, is indeed the very mark
of a supramental consciousness and distinguishes it from the
disintegrated, ignorantly successive steps of our consciousness
in the Ignorance. The gnostic existence and delight of existence
is a universal and total being and delight, and there will be the
presence of that totality and universality in each separate movement:
in each there will be, not a partial experience of self or a
fractional bit of its joy, but the sense of the whole movement of
an integral being and the presence of its entire and integral bliss
of being, Ananda. The gnostic beings knowledge self-realised
in action will be, not an ideative knowledge, but the Real-Idea
of the supermind, the instrumentation of an essential light of
Consciousness; it will be the self-light of all the reality of being
and becoming pouring itself out continually and filling every
particular act and activity with the pure and whole delight of its
self-existence. For an infinite consciousness with its knowledge
by identity there is in each differentiation the joy and experience
of the Identical, in each finite is felt the Infinite.
An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transformation
of our world-consciousness and world-action: for it
takes up into the new power of awareness not only the inner
existence but our outer being and our world-being; there is a
remaking of both, an integration of them in the sense and power
of the spiritual existence. Theremust come upon us in the change
at once a reversal and rejection of our present way of existence
and a fulfilment of its inner trend and tendency.
Sri Aurobindo :
Life Divine(PDF)
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