Sri Aurobindo
Essays Divine and Human
Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950
Non-Being, Being and the Absolute
16
Nothing can arise from Nothing. Asat, nothingness, is a creation of our mind; where it cannot see or conceive, where its object is something beyond its grasp, too much beyond to give even the sense of a vague intangible, then it cries out “Here there is nothing.” Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a Zero. But what in truth is this zero? It is an incalculable Infinite.
Our sense1 by its incapacity has invented darkness. In truth there is nothing but Light, only it is a power of light either above or below our poor human vision's limited range.
For do not imagine that light is created by the Suns. The Suns are only physical concentrations of Light, but the splendour they concentrate for us is self-born and everywhere.
God is everywhere and wherever God is, there is Light. Jnanam chaitanyam jyotir Brahma.
*
Of all2 that we know we know only the outside; even when we imagine that we have intimately seized the innermost thing, we have touched only an inner external.
It is still a sheath of the covering, only it is a second or third or even a seventh sheath, not the most outward and visible.
It is the same when we think we know God or have possession of our highest inmost Self or have entered intimately into the inmost and supreme Spirit. What we know and possess is power or some powers of God, an aspect or appearance or formulation of the Self; what we have entered into is only one wideness or one depth of the Spirit.
This is because we know and possess by the mind or even what is below the mind, and when we find ourselves most spiritual, it is the mind spiritualised that conceives of itself as spirit. Imagining that we have left mind behind us, we take it with us into its own spiritual realms and cover with it the Supramental Mystery. The result is something to us wonderful and intense; but compared with That Intensity and Wonder, it is something thin and inadequate.
A highest aspect of the infinite Reality is the supracosmic Absolute, unthinkable, ineffable, without relation to the universe.
Circa 1927
1 [alternative:] The eye
2 this passage is absent at 12 Volume of Complete Woks and is at the 17 volume of SABC
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