Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

God: The One Reality

Non-Being, Being and the Absolute

20

Being is not Parabrahman nor is Non-Being Parabrahman; these are only affirmative and negative terms in which Consciousness envisages its self-existence.

Parabrahman is beyond Knowledge because Knowledge cannot comprehend that which comprehends it and is anterior to itself.

The beginning of Wisdom is to renounce the attempt to know the Unknowable.

Nevertheless vast shadows of the Unknowable are reflected in Knowledge and to these infinities we give names, the Absolute, the Relative, Being, Non-Being, Consciousness, Force, Bliss, God, Self, the Personal, the Impersonal, Krishna, Shiva, Brahman.

Each thing in the universe is All in the Universe and also That which is beyond the universe, — what Knowledge sees of it is only the face that the All presents in some play of Its infinite consciousness. We are our own Knowledge and all that is unknown to our Knowledge.

What matters in the universe is the play of the All in Itself and its ultimate self-fulfilment in Knowledge, Bliss and Being.

There is an individual self-fulfilment, a collective, a cosmic and an extra-cosmic. We may move towards any of these ultimate affirmations, but he who accepts them all and harmonises them, is the highest human expression of Parabrahman. He is the Avatar or the divine Unit.

17.06.1914

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