Thread by @auromerevachas

🌸
(Selections from the Complete Works of #SriAurobindo)

Volume 21
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄 𝐃𝐈𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐄 - 𝐈

𝟏. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

"THE EARLIEST preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,

- for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage.

It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality.

The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings.

The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity

and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression.

To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to covert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental Illumination,

to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities,

to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.

To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity.

But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direction opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity.

To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise.

For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions.

The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised,

the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.

The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities;

for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body.

The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results aims always at a higher marvels;

for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge.

Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself,but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamentalmethod of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings."
#SriAurobindo

𝟐. 𝐄𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐢𝐦 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡

"We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it.

For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life

because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.

And then there seem to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind.

In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind,

and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life.

As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties.

As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life.

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god.

Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?
For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is.

We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond.

If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth."

#SriAurobindo

𝟑. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐍𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

"In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life.

In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, - or of some of them, - it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life;

in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit.

Nor has the intellect, which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found satisfaction in the answer that it has received."

#SriAurobindo

𝟒. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐓𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲

"...it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing.

For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity;

seized in by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations

and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible.

It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance.
The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind the great service.

#SriAurobindo

𝟓. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞

"...there is always a limit and an encumbrance, - the limit of the material field in the Knowledge, the encumbrance of the material machinery in the Power.

But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future.
As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial,

so also the higher achievements of practical Science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced.

Wireless telegraphy is Nature's exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception.

Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand.

#SriAurobindo

There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future."

#SriAurobindo

𝟔. 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞

"The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence,

without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe."

#SriAurobindo

𝟕. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐚𝐧'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬

"The universe comes to the individual as Life, - a dynamism the entire secret of which he has to master

and a mass of colliding results, a whirl of potential energies out of which he has to disengage some supreme order and some yet unrealised harmony.

This is after all the real sense of man's progress. It is not merely a restatement in slightly different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished.

Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality.
Otherwise, any system or order which assured a tolerable well-being and a moderate mental satisfaction would have stayed our advance.

The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours.
But man cannot rest permanently untill he reaches some highest good.

He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations.
He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal "

#SriAurobindo