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Chapter 6
The Vision of the Brahman
The Upanishad teaches us how to perceive Brahman in the universe and in our self-existence.
We have to perceive Brahman comprehensively as both the Stable and the Moving. We must see It in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity.
We have to perceive all things in Space and Time, the far and the near, the immemorial Past, the immediate Present, the infinite Future with all their contents and happenings as the One Brahman.
We have to perceive Brahman as that which exceeds, contains and supports all individual things as well as all universe, transcendentally of Time and Space and Causality. We have to perceive It also as that which lives in and possesses the universe and all it contains.
This is the transcendental, universal and individual Brahman, Lord, Continent and Indwelling Spirit, which is the object of all knowledge. Its realisation is the condition of perfection and the way of Immortality.
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Part II
The Mother
There is no other consciousness than the Supreme Consciousness.
There is no other will than the Supreme Will.
There is no other life than the Supreme Life.
There is no other personality than the Supreme Personality,
the One and the All. — The Mother
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Chapter 1
Understanding the Creation and the Creator
“On one side, he [the seeker] is aware of an infinite and self-existent Godhead in being who contains all things in an ineffable potentiality of existence, a Self of all selves, a Soul of all souls, a spiritual Substance of all substances, an impersonal inexpressible Existence, but at the same time an illimitable Person who is here self-represented in numberless personality, a Master of Knowledge, a Master of Forces, a Lord of love and bliss and beauty, a single Origin of the worlds, a self-manifester and self-creator, a Cosmic Spirit, a universal Mind, a universal Life, the conscious and living Reality supporting the appearance which we sense as unconscious inanimate Matter.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga)
Sweet Mother, what does a “self-creator” mean?
Self-creator? It means, that He creates Himself.
Create is taken in the sense of manifesting, of making objective, apparent. So it is His own self that He manifests. It is Himself He manifests, makes evident, objectivises.
In fact, the word “create” is usually taken in another sense: it means to make something out of something else. That is why Sri Aurobindo says “self-creator”, which means that He gives an external form of Himself to Himself. It is a change in the mode of being: instead of being an unmanifested possibility it becomes a manifested reality. It is simply reversed, nothing else. It is the same thing: from this side it is not seen; from that side it is seen – that’s all. You turn it round again and it is seen. You turn it like that and don’t see it, you turn it like this and see it. That’s all. As simple as that.
...it is the same thing which exists in itself, unmanifest, and then, suddenly, it does this (gesture of projection). And it is exactly the same thing, but it is a movement which puts forth what was within. And that’s what makes the world. It is the same thing in a double movement: as when you sleep and when you wake up, or when you remain still and when you begin to move, or when you are silent and then begin to make a noise, it is like that.
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Chapter 2
A Story to Understand the How of Creation
...we shall put aside the aridities of metaphysics, for it is better to read about them in the books of scholars who tell you things in a very precise, very exact and very dry fashion! The psychological point of view... it is better to live it than speak about it. So we are left with the story for children. It is good to be always a child. And although we must take care not to believe in it as a dogma in which nothing should be changed if one doesn’t want to be sacrilegious, we can at least take these stories as a means to make living to our childlike consciousness something which would otherwise be too remote from us.
There we can choose from many stories that have been told, stories more or less true, more or less complete, more or less expressive. But if by interiorising or exteriorising oneself – which, from a certain point of view, is essentially the same thing – if one can relive this story, at least partially and in its broad outlines, it helps one to understand and hence to master the how and why of things. Some people have done that, they are the ones usually considered as initiates, occultists and prophets at the same time – and very beautiful stories have been told.
I am going to tell you one, very succinctly. Don’t take it as a gospel! Take it rather... as a story.
When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation.
So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth.
You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself.... As soon as they set to work – they had their own conception of how it had to be done – being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in what I have just read to you,1 they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake – as I may call it – was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation – for that is the essential cause, separation – as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder.
The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter – obscure, inconscient, miserable.... The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done.
Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin.
So, there have been what might be called “successive involutions” in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others... for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds.
That is my story.
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1 “The sword has a joy in the battle-play, the arrow has a mirth in its hiss and its leaping, the earth has a rapture in its dizzy whirl through space, the sun has the royal ecstasy of its blazing splendours and its eternal motion. O thou self-conscious instrument, take thou too the delight of thy own appointed workings.” (The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 288)
Chapter 3
Descent of the Divine Love
and an Uninterrupted Ascent
...through the action of the forces of separation, Consciousness became inconscience and matter was created such as it is, on a basis of inconscience so total that no contact seemed possible between the Origin and what was created. And this total inconscience made a direct descent necessary, without sing through the intermediate regions, a direct descent of the divine Consciousness in its form of Love. And it is this descent of Divine Love into matter, penetrating it and adding a new element to its position, which has made possible the ascent, slow for us, but an uninterrupted ascent, from inconscience to consciousness and from darkness to light.
...this Divine Love which animates all things, penetrates all, upbears all and leads all towards progress and an ascent to the Divine, is not felt, not perceived by the human consciousness, and that even to the extent the human being does perceive it, he finds it difficult to bear – not only to contain it, but be able to tolerate it, I might say, for its power in its purity, its intensity in its purity, are of too strong a kind to be endured by human nature. It is only when it is diluted, deformed, attenuated and obscured, so to say, that it becomes acceptable to human nature. It is only when it moves away from its true nature and essential quality that man accepts it, and even (smiling) approves of it and glorifies it. This means that it must already be quite warped in order to be accepted by the human consciousness. And to accept it, bear it and receive it in its plenitude and purity, the human consciousness must become divine.
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You say, “Love is everywhere. Its movement is there in plants, perhaps in the very stones....” (CWM Vol. 3, pp. 69-70) If there is love in a stone, how can one see it?
Perhaps the different elements constituting the stone are coordinated by the spark of love. I am sure that when the Divine Love descended into Matter, this Matter was quite unconscious, it had absolutely no form; it may even be said that forms in general are the result of the effort of Love to bring consciousness into Matter. If one of you (I have my doubts, but still) went down into the Inconscient, what is called the pure Inconscient, you would realise what it is. A stone will seem to you a marvellously conscious object in comparison. You speak disdainfully of a stone because you have just a wee bit more consciousness than it has, but the difference between the consciousness of the stone and the total Inconscient is perhaps greater than that between the stone and you. And the coming out of the Inconscient is due exclusively to the sacrifice of the Divine, to this descent of Divine Love into the Inconscient. Consequently, when I said “perhaps in the stone”, I could have removed the “perhaps” – I can assert that even in the stone it is there. There would be nothing, neither stone nor metal nor any organisation of atoms without this presence of Divine Love.
Most people say there is “consciousness” when they begin to think – when one doesn’t think one is not conscious. But plants are perfectly conscious and yet they do not think. They have very precise sensations which are the expression of a consciousness, but they do not think. Animals begin to think and their reactions are much more complex. But both plants and animals are conscious. One can be conscious of a sensation without having the least thought.
Did material substance exist before the descent of Divine Love?
I don’t think it could be said that there was a material substance. The Inconscient... it is the Inconscient. I don’t know how to explain this to you. If there is a negation of something, it is truly the Inconscient, it is the negation of everything. It has not even the capacity of emptiness. One needs to have descended there to know what it is and explain it. Words cannot describe it. It is the negation of all things because everything begins with consciousness. Without consciousness there is nothing.
Were there any beings before this descent of Love? Were they conscious?
There were no terrestrial beings. The terrestrial world, the earth came into existence after the descent into the Inconscient, not before.
The gradual formation of the different stages of being, from the Supreme to the most material region, is subsequent to the Inconscient. When, precisely, the Consciousness “began” its creation (don’t take what I say quite literally as though it were a little history of another country, for it is not that, I am trying to make you understand, that’s all), the first manifestation of the creative Consciousness was just an emanation of consciousness – of conscious light – and when this emanation separated itself from its origin, the Inconscient was born, through opposition (how to put it?... yes, really through opposition. Consequently, the birth of the Inconscient is prior to the formation of the world, and it was only when the perception came that the whole universe was going to be created uselessly that there was a call and Divine Love plunged into the Inconscient to change it into consciousness. Therefore, it can be said that the formation of the material worlds as we know them is the result of the descent of the supreme Consciousness into the Inconscient. It cannot be said that there was something prior to that, things as we know them in the material world (I apologise for the ambiguity of my words, but you understand one cannot express these things in our usual words).
The formation of the earth as we know it, this infinitesimal point in the immense universe, was made precisely in order to concentrate the effort of transformation upon one point; it is like a symbolic point created in the universe to make it possible, while working directly upon one point, to radiate it over the entire universe.
If we want to make the problem a little more comprehensible, it is enough to limit ourselves to the creation and the history of the earth, for it is a good symbol of universal history.
From the astronomical point of view the earth is nothing, it is a very small accident. From the spiritual point of view, it is a symbolic willed formation. And as I have already said, it is only upon earth that this Presence is found, this direct contact with the supreme Origin, this presence of the divine Consciousness hidden in all things.
The other worlds have been organised more or less hierarchically, if one may say so, but the earth has a special formation due to the direct intervention, without any intermediary, of the supreme Consciousness in the Inconscient.
Have the solar fragments the same matter as the earth?
I have taken care to tell you that this radiation was a symbolic creation, and that all action on this special point had its radiation in the whole universe; remember this, instead of beginning to say that the formation of the earth comes from an element projected from the sun or that a nebula must have been scattered giving birth to the sun and all its satellites, etc.
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The state I found myself in was like a memory – a memory that is eternally present – of that Consciousness of supreme Love which the Lord emanated upon earth, in the earth – in the earth to – bring it back to Him. For that was truly a descent into the most total negation of the Divine, the negation of the very essence of the divine Nature, and therefore a renunciation of the divine state in order to accept earth’s obscurity and bring earth back to the divine state. And unless this supreme Love becomes all-powerfully conscious here on earth, the return can never be final.
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Chapter 4
How Were Gods and Goddesses Born?
Sweet Mother, how were the gods and goddesses born?
But it is precisely... it is part of the creation. What we call “Aditi” here, that is, the Creative Consciousness, well, the Creative Consciousness...
I am going to tell you about this in an absolutely childish way:
She formed at first four beings; when she received the mission to create she put out four emanations from her being; and these four emanations were made and given the charge to develop the universe. And then – I think I have already spoken to you about this once – it turned out badly, we could put it like that; and so when things went wrong, she made another creation of all the beings who became the gods; and parallel to the disorder created by the first four emanations, there was the development in order, that is, under the guidance of the Supreme, the creation in order of all the worlds descending further and further towards Matter. And it is to this line that the gods belong who were manifested later, a formation, a greater and greater materialisation in the domain which Sri Aurobindo has termed the Overmind. And from there they presided over the creation of the material universe and the earth. And one of the proceedings was the formation of the earth as a symbolic creation representative of the whole universe, in order to condense and concentrate the problem so that it might be solved more easily. And this earth, though it may be from the astronomical point of view something infinitesimal and as unimportant as can be, from the occult point of view of the universal creation it is a symbol which represents the universe so perfectly that by transforming the earth one can through contagion or analogy transform the universe, because the earth is the symbol of the universe. This was the procedure adopted by the gods. And the place that’s the seat of existence of these gods Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind.
Of course things are not like that. Don’t think that I have just told you the story as it really happened. Things are not like that, but it’s a way of speaking, a way of making them understandable to the brain. It appears to have occurred like that.
But the four beings I first spoke to you about are sexless, they were neither man nor woman; and in the vital world there is an entire part of the vital creation which is the result of these beings, an entire part which has no sex. Besides, the gods too made a world which was sexless. It is the world of angels, what are called angels, what in occultism are called fashioners. But these are sexless spirits; they are represented with wings, you know, they are sexless spirits.
There are in the universe, already, beings who have no sex, who are neither men nor women, and there are many of them in the vital world. There are entities with sex in the vital world but in its most material part, the one closest to the earth, and not in its most important part; the most important part is sexless. This does not make them any better, however, since they are all beings hostile to the divine Will and divine realisation, but it gives them a terrific force. And so in return the gods too have created a whole set of beings who have no sex and whom men speak of as angels; how does one call it? “Your guardian angel”, or what else? It is especially “angel”.
(Pavitra) Cherubim, seraphim.
Yes, yes, that’s it. They have given many names. There, then.
Sweet Mother, in the old traditions they always speak of the wives of the gods who are troubled by the asuras.
What, the wives of the gods who were troubled by the asuras? Yes!
They too are closer to the material world? Is it in the vital world or in...
It is in the vital world.
(Pavitra) Mother, in the mind also, there are beings of the mind...
There are beings of the mental world which are also sexless, not all, but many. There are many of them. There are some of these mental formations which are persistent, you see, which are very well made, very well harmonised, persistent, some kind of mental constructions, mental formations which are living beings, but which pass indifferently from a masculine to a feminine body when they incarnate. It is all the same to them, to them it makes no difference.
That’s all, or you still have something?
Mother, what is the real reason for the appearance of sex? Because in the study of biology we see that first the unicellular animals were sexless; sex appeared later.
That – it is Nature, my child, who has tried all kinds of methods. These are all means employed by Nature; she wanted... It would seem that for the perfection of the species the dividing was necessary from the point of view of the material evolution; it seems so because obviously it was adopted later. This... Nature... I think she has tried every possible thing, everything.
But you say that even the gods have a sex.
Yes. Well, perhaps it is under their inspiration that Nature made it. It is certainly not because it appeared on earth that it is like that with the gods. So logically we can think that because it was like that among the gods it has become like that on earth. But Nature doesn’t seem to have received direct inspirations; she seems to have followed her own path in her own fashion. Yet she has tried all possible things; I don’t think there’s anything she hasn’t tried, and she goes on. But Nature too has created sexless beings, even in human form; it has happened. I have even seen a Greek statue like that. The Greeks knew this.
Everything that one can imagine and much more, Nature has imagined. Only, she doesn’t want to be hurried. I think it amuses her. So she wants to go in her own way: trying, demolishing, re-starting, demolishing again. She can destroy an entire species by doing just this (gesture), it is quite the same to her; she would simply say, “No, it was not good.” And then, there, it is finished. And she doesn’t want to be hurried. If she is told that we find it has lasted long enough like this, that it could come to a slightly more harmonious conclusion, she revolts, she is not at all pleased. This is what she always says: “But why are you in a hurry? All that you want to do will happen, but it is not necessary that it should happen so fast. Why are you in such a hurry?” That’s what she always answers. She likes to roam about.
What is Nature? That is, what is her relation with the Supreme Mother?
I think that Nature is the most material part of the creative force which is concerned with the creation specially of the earth, of the material world as we know it upon earth.
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Do the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology have any real existence?
Between the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology, all kinds of similarities are found; it could be an interesting subject for study. To the modern Western world, all these divinities – the Greek gods and other “pagan” gods, as they call them – are simply a product of human imagination and correspond to nothing real in the universe. But this is a gross error.
To understand the mechanism of universal life, even that of terrestrial life, one has indeed to know that all these are real and living beings, each in its own realm, and have an independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist. The majority of these gods existed before man existed.
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From where do the gods come?
That means?... “From where” means what? What is their origin? Who has formed them?... But everything, everything comes from the one Origin, from the Supreme, the gods also.
There is a very old tradition which narrates this. I am going to tell you the story as one does to children, for in this way you will understand:
One day “God” decided to exteriorise himself, objectivise himself, in order to have the joy of knowing himself in detail. So, first of all, he emanated his consciousness (that is to say, he manifested his consciousness) by ordering this consciousness to realise a universe. This consciousness began by emanating four beings, four individualities which were indeed altogether very high beings, of the highest Reality. They were the being of consciousness, the being of love (of Ananda rather), the being of life and the being of light and knowledge – but consciousness and light are the same thing. There we are then: consciousness, love and Ananda, life and truth – truth, that’s the exact word. And naturally, they were supremely powerful beings, you understand. They were what are called in that tradition the first emanations, that is, the first formations. And each one became very conscious of its qualities, its power, its capacities, its possibilities, and, suddenly forgot each in its own way that it was only an emanation and an incarnation of the Supreme. And so this is what happened: when light or Consciousness separated from the divine Consciousness, that is, when it began to think it was the divine Consciousness and that there was nothing other than itself, it suddenly became obscurity and inconscience. And when Life thought that all life was in itself and that there was nothing else but its life and that it did not depend at all upon the Supreme, then its life became death. And when Truth thought that it contained all truth, and that there was no other truth than itself, this Truth became falsehood. And when love or Ananda was convinced that it was the supreme Ananda and that there was no other than itself and its felicity, it became suffering. And that is how the world, which was to have been so beautiful, became so ugly. Now, that consciousness (if you like to call it the Divine Mother, the Supreme Consciousness), when she saw this she was very disturbed, you may be sure, she said to herself: “This has really not succeeded.” So she turned back to the Divine, to God, the Supreme, and she asked him to come to her aid. She said to him: “This is what has happened. Now what is to be done?” He said: “Begin again, but try to manage in such a way that the beings do not become so independent! ... They must remain in contact with you, and through you with me.” And it was thus that she created the gods, who were quite docile and not so proud, and who began the creation of the world. But as the others had come before them, at every step the gods met the others. And it was in this way that the world changed into a battlefield, a place of war, strife, suffering, darkness and all the rest, and for each new creation the gods had to fight with the others who had gone ahead: they had preceded them, they had plunged headlong into matter; and they had created all this disorder and the gods had to put straight all this confusion. That is where the gods came from. They are the second emanations.
Mother, the first four who changed, was it by chance or was it deliberately?
No. What is chance?
It is said also – that is the continuation of the story or rather its beginning – that the Divine wanted his creation to be a free creation. He wanted all that went forth from him to be absolutely independent and free in order to be able to unite with him in freedom, not through compulsion. He did not want that they should be compelled to be faithful, compelled to be conscious, compelled to be obedient. They had to do it spontaneously, through the knowledge and conviction that that was much better. So this world was created as a world of total freedom, freedom of choice. And it is in this way that at every moment everyone has the freedom of choice – but with all the consequences. If one chooses well, it is good, but if one chooses ill, ah well, what’s to happen happens – that is what has happened!
The story may be understood in a much more occult and spiritual sense. But it is like all the stories of the universe: if you want to narrate them so that people may understand, they become stories for children. But if one knows how to see the truth behind the symbols, one understands everything. Even with what I have told you, which seems like a little story for children, even like that, if you understand what I have told you and the meaning of what I have told you, you can have the secret of things.
There are traditions which say that it is an “accident”, in the sense that it could have been otherwise. But it happened like that. It is true, it came about like that. Only, it was quite understandable that, every one of these elements having its origin in the Supreme, being quite close to the Emanation at that moment, quite close to the Origin, carried in itself the consciousness of its divinity and superiority, necessarily, since this is not a creation made with something foreign to the Divine: it is simply the Divine who has emanated himself, as though he were looking at himself – he objectivises himself in order to become aware of all that he is; instead of being in an inner static state of concentration in which all is unmanifested, he projects that outside himself “in order to see”, as though he wanted to see all that is within him, that is, all the infinity of possibilities. So, all was possible. It happened like that – it could have happened otherwise. Besides, nothing tells you that alongside our universe such as it is, there do not exist others which are so different that there cannot be any relation between one universe and another. It can very well be that our universe is not the only exteriorisation of the Divine. Ours is such as we know it; there may be others which are in much less sorry a state than this one! Besides, it is lamentable only in its appearance. If you go behind the appearance, you become aware that it is not lamentable at all. It is only one way of seeing.
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