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Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume I - Part 5

Fragment ID: 10763

Āsurīṣu1 can’t possibly mean “animal”. The Gita uses precise terms and if it had meant animal it would have said animal and not Asuric. As for the punishment, it is that they [Asuric men] go down in their nature to more depths of Asurism till they touch bottom as it were. But that is a natural result of their uncontrolled tendencies which they freely indulge without any effort to rise out of them while by the cultivation of the higher side of personality one naturally rises and develops towards godhead or the Divine. In the Gita the Divine is regarded as the controller of the whole cosmic action through Nature, so the “I cast” is in harmony with its ideas. The world is a mechanism of Nature, but a mechanism regulated by the presence of the Divine.

 

1 Kṣipāmyajasram aśubhān āsurīṣveva yoniṣu. “I cast down them continually into more and more Asuric births.” Gita 16.19.

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