Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

God: The One Reality

Non-Being, Being and the Absolute

18

The Origin and eternal Supporter of all existence, as of all that seems to ignorant Mind to be non-existence, is a supreme infinite and absolute. This Infinite is an essential, not, except in manifestation, a mobile temporal or extended spatial infinite; this Absolute is an expressibly positive, not a merely negating absolute — not excluding, but containing all relatives; for in it they¹ find their own eternal and stable truth behind their present temporary and fluctuating appearance.

The Supreme is knowable to itself but unknowable to mind, inexpressible by words, because mind can grasp and words coined by the mind can express only limited, relative and divided things. Mind gets only misleading inadequate indefinite impressions or too definite reflective ideas of things too much beyond itself. Even here in its own field it grasps not things in themselves, but processes and phenomena, significant aspects, constructions and figures. But the Supreme is to its own absolute consciousness for ever self-known and self-aware, as also to supramental gnosis it is intimately known and knowable.

This Infinite and Eternal is the supreme Self of all, the supreme Source, Spirit and Person of all, the supreme Lord of all; there is nothing beyond it, nothing outside it. A million universes for ever persist or for ever recur because they are substantial expressions and manifestations of the supreme Infinite and Eternal.

Circa 1930

¹ [In manuscript:] their

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