Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

God: The One Reality

Ekamevadvitiyam: One Without a Second

12

All existence is one; it is existence of the One Being, divine, infinite, eternal, absolute.

What we see as the Many, is the multiplicity of the One. All these apparently separate persons and objects are also the one existence; they are beings of the One Being. For That is their one self; in their spiritual essence they are That, even in the play and form of their being they are That; they are personalities of the one Person, they are manifestations of the one Existence, they are so many realities of the only Real. In no way are they separate and independent from It, but in every way live by It, are of It, can be nothing else. All forces are powers of the one Force, the sole Power of the One Being; there is no other force than his. All objects are formations of the one Existence; there is nothing that exists in itself and apart from That, nothing that is of an individual essence other than the one Essence of the universe.

What we see as finite is not other than the Infinite. All is in the Infinite, all exists by the Infinite, all is of the stuff of the Infinite. No object or person could come into being or remain in being by its own finite and individual power; none exists by its own limited substance and essence other than the substance and essence of all others; all are at bottom indissolubly one. There is effective determination, definition, demarcation, diverse formation in the universe but no essential separation or division. A tree is separate as an object or phenomenon, but it is not a separate existence divided from all around it; there is a one-existence and a one-energy that has taken form of tree, constitutes every atom, molecule, fibre of it, pervades and is its whole structure of being and this existence, this energy not only abides in all of it and flows through all of it but extends everywhere around and is, constitutes, energises all other objects in the cosmos. Each finite is in fact the Infinite; all apparently separate or divided existence is only a front of the Indivisible.

All that we see as temporal is not other than the Eternal. The form of that which is in Time is or appears to be evanescent, but the self, the substance, the being that takes shape in that form is eternal and is one self, one substance, one being with all that is, all that was, all that shall be. But even the form is in itself eternal and not temporal, but it exists for ever in possibility, in power, in consciousness in the Eternal. Form is manifested and withdrawn from manifestation; it may be manifested by immediate apparition or it may be manifested by construction and withdrawn from manifestation by destruction or disaggregation, but in either case it exists beforehand in the consciousness and being of the Eternal. If it did not so preexist in power and possibility, it could not be created in actuality. For the actual proceeds from the possible and the possible is always a possibility of the truth of the Eternal.

Circa 1942

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