Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

God: The One Reality

Ekamevadvitiyam: One Without a Second

9

All existence is the existence of the one Divine Eternal and Infinite, there is and can be nothing else; not only the infinite is that but the finite, not only the timeless but Time and all that is in Time, not only the Impersonal but the Person, quality and number and that which [is] beyond quality and number; the Formless and form, the individual no less than the cosmic and supracosmic, matter and life and mind as well as the spirit, the relative and the absolute. All is that: ekam evadvitiyam.

All that is is reality of the Real; there is no need to invent an eternal illusive principle of Maya to account for world existence. The idea that the Supreme Reality is incapable of self-manifestation and that its only power is a power of self-delusion is a last desperate refuge of the human Mind and Reason trying to escape from a difficulty which is of its own creation, its own self-imposed illusion or Maya and does not exist for the true and perfect supramental consciousness of the luminous Spirit.

There is no incompatibility between the Eternal and existence in Time. Time and the Timeless are the same Eternity in a self-contained status and a self-developing movement. The Timeless is eternal and knows itself in an everlasting present; Time too is eternal and is known in an indivisible movement of past, present and future. It is our consciousness poising itself in the mobile moment that gives us the impression of a divided Time, of consciousness moving from moment to moment, losing its past, gaining its future, connecting the three only by an act of memory which binds the is to the was and the to be. In the eternal Consciousness the past still exists and extends through the present into the future. To suppose that the Timeless is debarred by its timelessness from throwing itself out in a movement of Time and that Time therefore and all in time is an illusion or to suppose that Time alone exists and we are its temporal creations is to impose the ignorance and limitation of our little surface consciousness on the Divine Eternal. In reality we ourselves below our surface are the timeless developing in movement our existence in eternal Time.

Circa 1927/33

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