Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

Nature: The World-Manifestation

The Divine and the Manifestation

23

The One and the Many are both of them eternal aspects of the Absolute Parabrahman which is Itself neither one nor many in an exclusive sense. It is beyond unity and multiplicity in its essential truth as it is beyond all other oppositions, but neither unity nor multiplicity, neither the One nor the Many are illusions, they are both of them truths of the Absolute, otherwise they could have no existence nor could they come into existence. The world is a manifestation, and in it the absolute Parabrahman manifests as the Ishwara, the one Eternal, but also It manifests the multiplicity of the One in the Jiva. This creates in the manifestation the double aspect of Being and Becoming. But becoming does not mean that Being becomes what it never was before or that it ceases to be its eternal self; it manifests something that is already in its existence, a truth, a power, an aspect of itself; only the forms are temporal and can be deformed by the Ignorance. The Power of itself which thus manifests what is in its being is its Shakti, Maya or Prakriti, three names for the same thing. It is called Prakriti when it is seen in its executive aspect as working out the manifestation for the Purusha or Ishwara.

Whether we regard the soul that manifests in a body as a portion of the Divine, eternal therefore like the Divine, as is held by the Gita, or the Divine himself in his aspect of multiplicity, or a separate being dependent on the Divine, as is held by the dualists, or an illusory self-perception of the soul subject to Maya, the reality being the Divine himself, indivisible and ever unmanifested — one thing is certain that what appears as the Jiva is something unborn and eternal.

Circa 1942

	{DocumentDescription}
		{EndingDate}
			{Year}
				1942
			{/Year}
			{Exactness}
				Circa
			{/Exactness}
		{/EndingDate}
		{DateType}
			Writting
		{/DateType}
		{WorkKind}
			Manuscript
		{/WorkKind}
	{/DocumentDescription}