SITE OF SRI AUROBINDO & THE MOTHER
      
Home Page | Workings | Works of Sri Aurobindo | Essays Divine and Human

Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

Nature: The World-Manifestation

The Divine and the Manifestation

27

God is not a Being who creates and governs the universe, but the universe itself and all besides that is Timeless and Spaceless.

God is also a Being who creates the universe in Himself and governs it; for the universe is only one term of His existence. If one could conceive a centre that contains its own circle, we might have a just definition of God in the universe.

What is the Impersonality of God? It is the fact of the Is Not, the Is and the Becoming. And what is the personality of God? It is the fact that all this, the Is like the Becoming, the Is not like the Is, is aware of itself in Time and Space and beyond them.

The Impersonality of Love is a self-existent Delight which embraces, possesses and makes one in being all that manifests in Brahman. The Personality of Love is One who is aware of self-Delight and extends His Love in all creatures.

Personality and Impersonality are the same reality differently conceived by Knowledge. Ego is the consciousness of the One Infinite Personality reflected in a limiting form of consciousness and distorted by the limitation. The form itself is a face of the All which has forgotten in the succession of Time moments, in the coherence of Space-units all that is behind itself and involved in itself. Ego is a bridge by which it awakes to self-Ignorance and returns towards self-Knowledge.

If we stand on the bridge facing the world of Forms we tend towards the Relative; if we face away from them we tend towards the Absolute. It is only when we have crossed the bridge that we can easily and perfectly embrace the Relative in the Absolute.

Spirit and Matter, Pure Being and Being formally extended in Space are the two poles of the universe. In Spirit there is no ego; in substance of Matter there is no ego. In each pole ego loses itself, but in Spirit through synthesis, in Matter through dissolution.

Substance of matter, life and mind are the material which Ego uses to develop its conscious existence; there are higher infinite affirmations in which it fulfils its conscious existence.

There is a unity of essence and a unity of sum. The latter is only a synthetic formula and affirmation of multiplicity. The unity of essence is the true unity.

Unity and multiplicity are necessary to each other and one reality. Multiplicity is unity extended in its possibility; unity is multiplicity self-gathered into its essence[.]

06.1914