Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On His Published Prose Writings

Passages from Lights on Yoga [9]

“The Jivatman... knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara. It is important to remember the distinction; for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatar or lose balance like Hridaya with Ramakrishna” [pp. 15–16]. Can the Jivatman status be realised before vital egoism is abolished?

One can get the knowledge or perception in the higher mind “I am That” while the vital is still untransformed,— then the vital ego can take it up and give it a wrong application.

How can one go so far as to think of oneself as an Avatar? Is it because, if there is union with the Divine, the sense of all-powerfulness that it brings is reflected on the vital ego as something grandiose?

Yes. It is when one feels that one is the Divine, So aham but not in the impersonal way to which all is the one Brahman, the One Self, but in the personal way “I am God, the Parameshwara”. It is as in the Puranic story in which the knowledge was given both to Indra and Virochana and the God understood but the Asura concluded that he the ego was the Divine and therefore went about trying to impose his ego on the universe.

26 November 1935