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 [11]

“Moreover, the multiple Divine is an eternal reality antecedent to the creation here” [p. 17]. Does this mean that souls existed eternally separate from the Brahman? In other words are Jiva and Brahman eternally separate?

The Brahman is not a mathematical One with the Many as an illusion — he is an infinite One with an infinite multiplicity implied in the Oneness. This is not Dwaitavada — for in Dwaitavada the many are quite different from the One. In the Sankhya Prakriti is one but the Purushas are many, so it is not Sankhya, nor I suppose Jainism, unless Jainism is quite different from what it is usually represented to be.

Does “antecedent to the creation” mean creation as it took place from Supermind downward or does it simply mean the material creation?

The material creation or the creation of the universe generally.

If the multiple Divine is to be taken as an eternal reality, does this not come down to something like Jainism and Sankhya, in which several Purushas exist eternally? This would be a pure Dwaitavada.

It is on the contrary a complete Adwaitavada, more complete than Shankara’s who splits Brahman into two incompatible principles — the Brahman and a universe of Maya which is not Brahman and yet somehow exists. In this view which is that of the Gita and some other Vedantic schools the Para Shakti and the Many are also Brahman. Unity and Multiplicity are aspects of the Brahman, just as are Personality and Impersonality, Nirguna and Saguna.

18 March 1936