-61_Arguments to The Life Divine.html

Arguments

to

The Life Divine

Chapter XIX

Life

ARGUMENT

Mind as a final action of Supermind is a creative and not only a perceptive power; in fact, material force itself being only a Will in things working darkly as the expression of subconscious Mind, Mind is the immediate creator of the material universe But the real creator is Supermind; for wherever there is Mind conscious or subconscious, there must be Supermind regulating from behind the veil its activities and educing from them their truth of inevitable result Not a mental Intelligence, but Supermind is the creator of the universe —Mind manifests itself in the form of Force to which we give the name of Life, and Life in Matter is an energy or power in dynamic movement which builds up forms, energises, maintains, disintegrates and recreates; death itself is only a process of life It is one all-pervading Life or constant movement of dynamic energy which creates all these forms of the material universe and is not destroyed in the destruction of its forms —The distinction between animal and plant life is unreal and that between the animate and the inanimate unessential Plant-life has been found to be identical in organisation with animal-life and, although the organisation may differ, life is also present in the metal, the earth, the atom This life-force pervades the universe and is present in every form of it and there is a constant interchange of its energies which creates the symptoms and characteristics of vitality recognised by us; but even where these are suspended, Life is present and only withdraws by a process of dispersion which replaces the process of continual reconstitution of the form The presence of these symptoms and characteristics is not the essential nor is their absence a sign of the

Sri Aurobindo prefixed brief summaries or “arguments” to fifteen chapters of The Life Divine when they were first published in the Arya in 1916 and 1917 He omitted these summaries when he revised the book in 1939 ­ 40  

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absence of Life-force Even where we do not detect Life, it exists —Conscious nervous sensation accompanies life in the animal, but much of the action of nervous or life energy is subconscious; in the plant, as in many actions of man, the nervous sensation is present but the mentality of the sensation is subconscious In the very atom there is a subconscious will and desire which must also be present in all atomic aggregates because they are present in the Force which constitutes the atom That force is Chit-shakti, force of conscious being, variously represented in various forms of life —Life is an energising of conscious being in substance of Matter, which on one side is constantly supplying the material of physical formation and on the other labouring to release mind and sense from their subconscious sleep in Matter It is therefore the dynamic link between Mind and Matter To create form and evolve consciousness out of its imprisonment in form is the sense of the omnipresent Life in the universe.

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Chapter XX

Death, Desire and Incapacity

ARGUMENT

Life is the same whatever its workings and its terms need not be limited to those proper to physical existence Life is a final operation of divine conscious-force for individualising existence; it is the energy-aspect of Mind when that creates and relates itself to form of substance: it has all the universal conscious-force of existence behind it and is not a separate entity or movement Life in us must become conscious of this divine Force behind it in order to become divine —Life, at first darkened, ignorant, divided and helplessly subject, seeks as it develops to become master and enjoyer, to grow in Power; but until it escapes from the bonds of individuality it must be subject to its three badges of limitation, Death, Desire and Incapacity —The nature of physical life imposes death because all life exists by a mutual devouring and struggle and Life itself feeds upon the forms it creates; but the fundamental justification of Death is the necessity of a constant variation of experience in succession of Time, the soul seeking thus to enlarge itself and move towards the realisation of its own infinity —The process of Death results inevitably from the division of substance; life’s attempt to aggrandise its being thus divided and limited translates itself into the hunger that devours This hunger is the crude form of Desire, and Desire is the necessary lever for self-affirmation; but eventually Desire has to grow out of the law of Hunger into the law of Love —Desire itself is the result of the limitation of capacity which is the consequence of divided Life working as the energy of ignorant mind, all-force being only possible to all-knowledge Therefore growth by struggle is the third Law of Life This strife again has to divinise itself and become the clasp of Love Until then Death, Desire and Strife are and must be the triple mask of the divine Life-principle in its cosmic self-affirmation.

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Chapter XXI

The Ascent of Life

ARGUMENT

The development of Life starts from an original status of division, subconscious will and inert subjection to mechanical forces This is the type of material existence —The terms of the second status which we recognise as vitality, are death, hunger and conscious desire, sense of limited capacity and the struggle for survival and mastery This is the basis of the Darwinian conception of Life, the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest But this struggle involves a third status whose preparation is marked by the emergence of the conscious principle of love —The third status contradicts the others in appearance, but really fulfils them Life begins with division and aggregation based on the refusal of the atom, the first principle of ego and individuality to accept death and fusion by dissolution This gives a firm basis for the creation of aggregate forms to be occupied by vital and mental individualities In the next stage we have the general principle of death and dissolution by which the individual form fuses itself in its elements into other lives This principle of constant fusion and interchange is the law of Life and extends into vital and mental existence as well as the physical The two principles of individual persistence and mutual fusion have to be harmonised and this can only be done by the emergence and full development of mind which alone is subtle enough to persist in individual consciousness beyond all fusion and dissolution of forms Here the union and harmony of the persistent individual and the persistent aggregate life become possible —Love is the power by which this union and harmony are worked out; for love exists by the persistence of the individual and his conscious acceptance of the necessity and desire of interchange and self-giving Its growth means the emergence of Mind imposing its law on the material existence, for Mind does not need to devour  

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in order to possess and grow; it increases by giving and confirms itself by fusion with others —Subconscious will in the atom becomes hunger and conscious desire in the vital being Love is the transfiguration of desire, a desire of possessing others but also of self-giving; at first subject to hunger and the desire of possession it reveals its own true law by an equal or greater joy in self-giving —The inert subjection of the will in the atom to the not-self becomes in the vital being the sense of limited capacity and the struggle for possession and mastery In the third status the not-self is recognised as a greater self and subjection to its law and need freely accepted; at the same time the individual by making the aggregate life and all it has to give his own, fulfils his impulse of possession This is the Mind’s reconciliation of the two conflicting principles which we find at the root of all existence —But the true and perfect reconciliation can only come by passing beyond Mind and founding all the operations of life on the essential freedom and unity of the spirit.

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Chapter XXII

The Problem of Life

ARGUMENT

Life being a divided movement of consciousness although really an undivided force becomes a clash of opposing truths each striving to fulfil itself Mind has to solve the thousand and one problems resulting but in Life itself, not merely in thought The difficulty lies in its ignorance of itself and the world Man knows only the surface of his own being and does not know the universality of the Force of which he is a part; therefore he can master neither himself nor the world He has to know and solve the problem or else give place to some higher evolutionary being —The poise of Life is determined by the relation of the Force to the Consciousness which drives it Accordingly we have, besides the Infinite Existence, first the life of material Nature ruled by the infallible Inconscient; secondly the life of conscious being in material Nature emerging out of the Inconscient, fallible, bewildered, only half-potent, which is our own; and thirdly the life of the real Man to which we are moving where Consciousness and Force are fulfilled and in harmony and the One at unison with the many That life will be founded on the awareness of one Consciousness in many minds, one Force working in many lives, one Delight of being in many hearts and bodies —Man’s difficulties; first, he only knows and governs a part of himself, the greater part of himself is subconscient and it is this greater cosmic part that really governs his surface being This is what is meant by his being governed by his Nature and by the Lord seated within through the Maya or apparent denial of Sachchidananda by Himself It is only by becoming one with the Lord that man can be master of himself, but this union must be in the Divine Maya, in the superconscient and not only or chiefly in this lower Maya of the mental existence —Secondly, he is separated by his individuality from the universal and does not.

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know his fellow-beings He must be not only in sympathy with them, but arrive at a conscious unity with all and this conscious unity exists only in what is now superconscient to us —Thirdly, Life is at war with body, Mind at war with the life and the body, each trying to subject the others to its own law Only the supramental can find the law of immortal harmony which shall reconcile this discord of our mortality Each of these principles has besides a soul in it which seeks a self-fulfilment beyond what the present force of life, mind or body can give There is a conflict between opposing instincts of the body, opposing desires and impulses of the life, opposing ideas of the mind The principle of unity is above in the supermind —Man as he develops becomes acutely aware of all these discords and seeks a reconciliation with himself and with his fellow-beings This can only come by the perfection of his own existence through the principle in himself to which he has not yet attained and by embracing consciously the life of others in his own through a universal consciousness which must also be gained by the superconscient becoming conscient in us through an upward evolution.

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Chapter XXIII

The Double Soul in Man

ARGUMENT

The ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter to its luminous consummation in Spirit Like the other original divine principles, this Delight also must be represented in us by a cosmic principle corresponding to it in the apparent existence It is the soul or psychic being —As there is a subliminal luminous mind behind our surface mind, a subliminal life behind our mortal life, a subliminal wider corporeality behind our gross body, so we have a double soul, the superficial desire-soul and the true psychic entity —The superficial in us is the small and egoistic, the subliminal is in touch with the universal So our subliminal or true psychic being is open to the universal delight of things, the superficial desire-soul is shut off from it . It feels the outward touches of things, not their essence and therefore not their rasa or true touch; and because it cannot reach the universal world-soul, it cannot find its own true soul which is one with the world-soul —The desire-soul returns the triple response of pleasure, pain and indifference, but the psychic being behind it has the equal delight of all of its experiences; it compels the desire-soul to more and more experience and to a change of its values By bringing this soul to the surface we can overcome the duality of pleasure and pain, as is actually done in certain directions of experience by the artist, Nature-lover, God-lover, etc each in his own fashion But the difficulty is to do it in the desire-soul at its centre where it comes into contact with practical living; for here the human mind shrinks from the application of the principle of equality —To bring this subliminal soul to the surface is not enough; for it is open passively to the world-soul but cannot possess the world Those who thus arrive, become close to the universal delight, but not masters of life For there  

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are two principles of order and mastery, one false, the ego-sense, the other true, the Lord who is one in the many By merely suppressing the ego-sense in the impersonal delight we gain the centreless Impersonal and are fulfilled in our static being but not in our active being We must therefore gain the other centre in the Supermind by which we shall consciously possess and not merely undergo the delight of the One in His universal existence.

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Chapter XXIV

Matter

ARGUMENT

Life and Mind are in the fact of evolution conditioned by the body and therefore by the principle of Matter The body is the chief difficulty in the way of a spiritual transformation of life; it has therefore been regarded by spiritual aspiration as an enemy and the escape from the material existence has been made an indispensable condition of the final emancipation —The quarrel begins with the struggle between Life and Matter with the apparent defeat of life in death as its constant circumstance; it continues with the struggle of the Mind against the life and the body and culminates with the struggle of the spirit against all its instruments; but the right end and solution of these discords is not an escape and a severance but the complete victory of the higher over the lower —We have to examine the problem of the reality of Matter Our present experience of Matter does not give us its truth; for Matter is only an appearance of the Reality, a form of its force-action presented to the principle of sense in the universal consciousness As Mind is only a final dividing action of Supermind and Life of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance, so Matter as we know it is only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that same working Mind precipitating itself into Life to create form gives to the universal principle of Being the appearance of material substance instead of pure substance, that is to say, of substance offering itself to the contact of mind as a stable thing or object This contact of mind with its object is Sense —In the divine Mind there is a movement which presents to the divine Knower the forms of Himself as objects to His knowledge and this would create a division between the Knower and the object of knowledge if there were not at the same time, inevitably, another movement by which He feels the object as

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Himself This movement, in the divided state of existence created by dividing Mind, is represented to us as the contact of sense which becomes a basis for contact through the thought-mind by which we return towards unity —Since the action of Mind is to divide infinitely the one infinite existence, Matter, the result of that action, becomes in its apparent nature an infinite atomic division and atomic aggregation of infinite substance But its reality is one and indivisible, even as is the reality of Life and of Mind Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight.

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Chapter XXV

The Knot of Matter

ARGUMENT

Spirit and Matter are the two ends of a unity, Spirit the soul and reality of Matter, Matter the form and body of Spirit There is an ascending series of substance and Spirit at the summit is itself pure substance of being Brahman is the sole material as well as the sole cause of the universe and Matter also is Brahman; it is, like Life, Mind and Supermind, a mode of the eternal Sachchidananda —Still, practically, Matter seems to be cut off from Spirit and even its opposite and the material existence incompatible therefore with the spiritual Matter is the culmination of the principle of Ignorance in which Consciousness has lost and forgotten itself and the self-luminous Spirit is represented by a brute inconscient Force in whose mere action there appears to be no self-knowledge, mind or heart In this huge no-mind Mind emerges and has to labour besieged and limited by the universal Ignorance and in this heartless Inconscience a heart has manifested which has to aspire opposed and corrupted by the brutality of material Force This is the form-absorbed Consciousness returning progressively to itself, but obliged to work under the conditions of Matter, that is to say, always bound and limited in its results —For Matter is the opposite of the Spirit’s freedom and mastery, the culmination of bondage; it is a huge force of movement, but of inertly driven movement subject to a law of which it has no conscience nor initiative but mechanically obeys It opposes therefore to the attempt of Life to impose itself and freely utilise and the attempt of Mind to impose itself and know and freely guide the constant opposition of its inertia; it yields reluctantly to a certain extent, but brings always in the end a definite denial, limit and obstruction For this reason knowledge, power, love, etc are always pursued, accompanied and hedged in by their opposites —For Matter is the culmination  

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of the principle of division and struggle It can only unify by an association which carries with it the possibility of dissociation and an assimilation which devours Therefore Life and Mind in Matter working under this law of division and struggle, that is to say, of death, desire and limitation, aggregation and subsequent dissociation, labour without any finality or certainty of assured progress —But especially the divisions of Matter bring in the law of pain Ignorance and Inertia would not be necessarily a cause of pain if the Mind and Life were not aware of an infinite Consciousness, Light and Power in which they live but are prevented from participating by the Ignorance and Inertia of Matter or were not stirred to possess this wideness partly or wholly Man especially, because he is most self-conscious, develops this awareness to a high degree, nor can he be permanently satisfied with increase of power or knowledge within the limits of the material world, for that is also limited and inconclusive and, being aware of and impelled by the infinite within and around him, he cannot escape the necessity of seeking to know and possess it This progression of the conscious being out of the Inconscient to the infinite Consciousness might be a happy outflowering but for the principle of rigid division and imprisonment of each divided being in his own ego which imposes the law of struggle, the dualities of attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, effort and failure, action and reaction, satisfaction and dissatisfaction All this is the denial of Ananda and implies, if the negation be insuperable, the futility of existence; for if in this existence the satisfaction sought by the Infinite in the finite cannot be found, then ultimately it must be abandoned as an error and a failure —This is the basis of the pessimist theory of material existence which supposes Matter to be the form and Mind the cause of the universe and both of these to be eternally subject to limitation and ignorance But if on the contrary it is immortal and infinite Spirit which has veiled itself in Matter and is emerging, the development of a liberated supramental being who shall impose in Mind, Life and Matter a higher law than that of limitation and division, is the inevitable conclusion from the nature of cosmic existence There is no reason why such a  

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being should not liberate and make divine the physical existence as well as the mind and life, unless our present view of Matter represents the sole possible relation here between sense and its object in which case, indeed, fulfilment must be sought only in worlds beyond But there are other states even of Matter and an ascending series of the gradations of substance, and their higher law is possible to the material being because it is there in it already latent and potential.

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Chapter XXVI

The Ascending Series of Substance

ARGUMENT

The materiality of Matter consists in a concentration of the density of substance and its resistance to the conscious-force of which through sense it becomes the object An ascending scale of substance from Matter to Spirit must mean a diminution of resistance, division and bondage and an increasing subtlety, flexibility, power of assimilation, interchange, transmutation, unification —There is such an ascending scale from the dense to the subtle even in material substance and beyond the subtlest material essence we have grades of other substance corresponding to the series of Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind and Spirit Each, that is to say, is the basis of a world or other kind of existence in which these higher principles successively dominate the others and fulfil themselves with their aid In each therefore there is an ever wider range of being, consciousness and force ascending from the inconscience of material substance to the infinite self-consciousness of spiritual But all these principles are interconnected Matter contains all of them and evolves them out of itself in obedience to the constant pressure of the higher worlds, an evolution which must continue until they are able to express themselves fully in the material principle —Man is the fit instrument for this fulfilment He has other bodies besides the physical in which he can become conscious and so enter into the supraphysical grades of substance and impose their law upon his material existence Therefore his complete perfection is through the ascent to supermind and the conquest of the physical also by the supramental substance so that he will be able to command a diviner physical life and conquer death in a divine body.

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Chapter XXVII

The Sevenfold Chord of Being

ARGUMENT

There are, therefore, seven or else eight principles of being and the four which constitute human existence are a refraction of the four which constitute divine existence, but in inverted order The Divine descends from pure existence to Supermind to cast itself into cosmic existence; the creature ascends from Matter to Mind towards the Divine and meets it where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them By the rending of the veil each of the four divine human principles can find its transfigured self in its divine equivalent This transfiguration is the only possible positive goal of the creative evolution —The presence of the seven principles is essential to all cosmic being For cosmic being cannot exist except as the All-existence figuring itself in its self-conception as Time and Space, nor can this figuration take place except by an infinite Force which being of the nature of an all-determining and all-apprehending Will must repose on the action of an all-comprehending infinite Consciousness Nor could the result be a cosmos but for a power of infinite knowledge and will determining out of the infinity in each figure of things their law, form and course through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from a boundless liberty within That power of Knowledge-Will, that Idea is the fourth name of the Divine; it is the Supermind or supreme Gnosis —The lower trilogy is also necessary in some form however different it may be from our experience of Life, Mind and Matter For there must be a subordinate power and action of Supermind measuring, creating fixed standpoints of mutual view and interaction in the universal self-diffusion as between an infinite number of centres of the one Consciousness; and such a power would be what we mean by Mind So too, Mind once given, Life, which is the working of will and energy and conscious dynamis of being dependent on

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such fixed standpoints of interaction, must accompany it and substance with differentiation of form must also be present —It follows that in every cosmic arrangement the seven principles must be existent, either manifested in simultaneous apparent action or else all apparently involved in one of them which then becomes the initial principle, but all secretly at work and bound to evolve into manifestation Therefore out of initial Matter latent Life and Mind have emerged as apparent Life and Mind, and latent Supermind and the hidden Spirit must emerge as apparent Supermind and the triune glory of Sachchidananda.

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Chapter XXVIII

The Knowledge and the Ignorance

ARGUMENT

The seven principles of existence are, then, one in their reality, inseparable in their sevenfold action They create the harmony of the universe and there is no essential reason why this should not be a complete harmony free from the element of discord, division and limitation —The Vedic seers believed in such a creation and held its formation in man —called immortality —to be the object of man’s Godward effort But this is difficult for the human mind to accept, except in a beyond, because here the Inconscient seems to be all and the conscient soul an accident or an alien unable fully to realise itself Here Ignorance seems to be the law —It is true that here we start from the Inconscient and are governed by the Ignorance; we must therefore examine this power of Consciousness and determine its operation and origin, —not accepting the refusal of some philosophies to consider the question because it is insoluble; and first we must fix what we mean by the Ignorance —In the Veda the Ignorance is the non-perceiving of the essential unity which is beyond mind and of the essence and self-law of things in their original unity and actual universality; it is a false knowledge based on division of the undivided, insistence on the fragmentary and little and rejection of the vast and complete view of things; it is the undivine Maya —The Vedantic distinction of Vidya and Avidya made the opposition more trenchant, Vidya being the knowledge of unity, Avidya the knowledge of multiplicity, but the knowledge of both was held to be necessary for the Truth and the Immortality; the Ignorance was not a mere falsehood and seeing of unreality The One really becomes

Chapter XXVIII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter VII

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the Many —Later, the opposition was supposed to be rigid and irreconcilable, the world unreal, a super-imposition of name and form on featureless Unity by Mind, the Ignorance an absolute nescience of the Truth —This we reject, because such dialectical oppositions, flawed at their source, represent no actual reality of existence as a whole; there is no irreconcilable opposition of dual principles, Ignorance creative, Knowledge destructive of world-existence, but an essential unity As pain is an effect of the universal Delight produced in the recipient by incapacity, as incapacity is a disposition of the universal Will-force, so ignorance is a particular action of the universal Knowledge —Consciousness, which is Power, takes three poises; its plenitude of the divine knowledge invariable in unity and multiplicity and beyond; its dwelling upon apparent oppositions, the extreme being the superficial appearance of complete nescience in the Inconscient; and a mediary term or compromise between the two which is a superficial and partial emergence of self-conscious knowledge, our own egoistic ignorance or false-knowledge The exact relations between these three have to be determined.

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ARGUMENT

Memory is believed by some schools to be the constituent of our continuous personality; but memory is only a mechanism, a device, a substitute for direct consciousness The mind is directly conscious of existence in the present, holds existence in the past by its substitute memory, infers its future existence from this direct present self-consciousness and the memory of its continuity in the past —This sense of self-conscious existence it extends into the idea of eternity, but the only eternity the mind really seizes is a continuous succession of moments of being in eternal Time; of this eternity it possesses only the present moment, a limited portion of the past held fragmentarily and nothing at all of the future, while it is unable to know any timeless eternity of conscious being, any real eternal Self Therefore the nature of our Mind is an Ignorance seizing at knowledge by successive action in the moments of Time —If mind is all, then we must remain for ever in this Ignorance which is not absolute nescience, but an ineffectual and fragmentary seizing at knowledge But there are really two powers of our conscious being, Ignorance of the mind, Knowledge beyond mind, simultaneously existing, either separately in an eternal dualism or, as is really the fact, as superior and inferior, sovereign and dependent states of the same consciousness, by which the Knower sees his timeless being and the action of Time in that self through the Knowledge while he sees himself in Time and travelling in the succession of its moments by the Ignorance For this reason the Upanishad declares that Brahman can really be known only by knowing

Chapter XXIX of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was revised in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter VIII  

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him as both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and so only can one arrive at the status of immortality —Ignorance is therefore the consciousness of being in the succession of Time, and it is so called because, actually self-divided by the moments of Time, the field of space and the forms of the multiplicity, it cannot know either eternal Being or the World, either the transcendent or the universal reality Its knowledge is partly true, partly false, because it ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon —It is through self-consciousness that the mind can arrive most readily at the eternal Reality; the rest of its means of knowledge are, like memory, devices and substitutes for direct consciousness It is easy therefore to regard the knowledge of the self within as real and the rest as not-self and illusion But the distinction is illusory and self-absorption in the stable self within is only one state of consciousness like self-dispersion in thought and memory and will The real self is the Eternal who is capable simultaneously of the mobility in Time and the immobility basing Time All object of knowledge is that real and eternal self whether seen in essence and stability or in phenomenon and instability of Time —The Ignorance is a means by which it is rendered into values of knowledge and action, Time being a sort of bank on which we draw for valuation and action in the present, with a realised store in the account of the past and an unrealised infinite deposit to be taken from the future so as to be made valuable for Time-experience and valid for Time-activity But, behind, all is known and ready for use according to the will of the Self in its dealings with Time and Space and Causality.

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Chapter XXX

Memory, Ego and Self-Experience

ARGUMENT

Consciousness of Self has two different aspects, the awareness of a stable, immutable and timeless Self beyond mentality and the awareness of a various self-experience in the process of Time and the field of Space There is a constant shifting of the point of Time, a constant though less obvious changing of the habitation and the environment and in these a constant subjective modifying of the experience of the states of personality and the experience of the environment —Memory here is an indispensable factor in the linking of past and present experience and is necessary to secure its continuity and coherence Still Memory is not all; it is only a mediator between the mind-sense and the coordinating mind —It is the mind-sense which shapes the object of experience as a wave of the conscious being into a movement of emotion, vitality, sensation or thought-perception There is also an act of mental observation and valuation of this wave in the sense-mind There is also the subject or mental being who thus modifies his mental becoming and observes and values it by an act of mind It is when the mental being stands back from the mental becoming and even from the mental act that he begins to perceive himself as something different from all becoming, mutable in that, but immutable beyond it He is not two selves, one that is and one that becomes, but one immutable who sees changing phenomena of his being, the immutability evident to a direct and pure self-consciousness, the mutable evident indirectly through a conditional and secondary mental consciousness —It is the character of this indirect mental consciousness which can experience only by succession of Time that brings in the device

Chapter XXX of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was revised in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter IX

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of Memory . Memory is not the essence of mental experience of becoming, nor of its continuity, nor of the recurrence of the same experience or the same cause and effect in Time These are circumstances of the movement of the stuff of conscious being and conscious force of being, a movement which is really undivided though only seen by mind in artificial divisions Memory is a device by which the experiences of the mind-sense are linked together and these artificial divisions in Time bridged over so that the coordinating mind and will may better and better use the material of experience and impose order on its conscious knowledge of its self and its conscious action in its environment It is an aid to our ignorance of self developing, in the evolution of mind out of inconscient force, knowledge of self by experience —The ego-sense is a mental device by which the mental being develops towards knowledge of that which experiences as well as of that which is experienced Memory only tells us that the successive experiences have happened in the same field of conscious being; it is the coordinating and distinguishing mind which tells us that it is the same mental being who experiences —Mind-substance suffers the changes of becoming; mind-sense experiences them; memory assures the mind-sense of its continuity of experience; the coordinating mind of knowledge relates them together and relates them also to the ego or being who, it says, is the same in past and present whether he forgets or remembers In the animal this may be little more than a coordination in the sense-mind by a discernment largely involved in the sensations and the memories, but in man it becomes a coordinating reason superior to sense and memory It is by this development that the ego-sense becomes distinct and disengaged from its aids —But it is itself only a device and basis for self-development of true self-knowledge; it is a stage in the evolution from nescience to partial knowledge and from partial knowledge to true self-consciousness The evolving Mind becomes by it aware of an “I” that becomes and then of a self superior to the becoming It may fix on either to the rejection of the other, but in doing so it acts on an imperfect self-knowledge It is as yet ignorant of all even of the individual  

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becoming which is not superficial; ignorant of the universal becoming except indirectly, as a not-self exterior to it Its attempt to find the true relation of the self and its becomings is based therefore on an Ignorance; that can only be truly known by an attempt to live out the relation in an integral development of self-knowledge That is the natural goal of our evolution which is the movement of the Ignorance to exceed itself and arrive at the conscious Truth of its being and conscious knowledge of all being.

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Chapter XXXI

The Boundaries of the Ignorance

ARGUMENT

We know only a part even of our superficial life and conscious becoming, fastening only on a little of our experience of self and things, memorising less, using still less for knowledge and action What we reject, Nature stores and uses in our development, for the most part by her subconscious action Our waking self is only a superimposition, a visible summit; the great body of our being is submerged or subliminal —The subliminal self perceives, remembers, understands, uses all that we fail to perceive, remember or use It provides all the material of our surface being which is only a selection from its wider existence and activity It is only the physical and vital part of our existence which is, properly speaking, subconscient; the subliminal self is the true mental being and in relation to our waking mind it is rather secretly circumconscient; for it envelops as well as supports Of all this larger part of our being we are ignorant —We are ignorant also of the superconscient, that which we ordinarily call spirit or oversoul; yet this we find to be our highest and widest self, Sachchidananda creating and governing all that we are and become by His divine Maya We are ignorant of the subliminal sea of our being which casts up the wave of our superficial existence; we are ignorant also of the superconscient ether of our being which constitutes, contains, overroofs and governs both the subliminal sea and the superficial wave —We are ignorant of ourselves in Time, for we know only a part of the present life we are living; yet that exists only by all our past of which we are ignorant and its trend is determined by all our future of which we are still more ignorant For our superconscient Self is eternal

Chapter XXXI of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter XI  

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in its being and Time is only one of its modes, our subliminal is eternal in its becoming and Time is its infinite field of experience —We are equally ignorant of the world, holding it to be not-self, ignorant of ourselves in Space; for the world is one Self developing the movement of its conscious force in its self-conceptive extension as Space We confine ourselves in our consciousness to a single knot of the one indivisible Matter, a single eddy of the one indivisible Life, a single station of the one indivisible Mind, a single soul-manifestation of the one indivisible Spirit Yet it is only by knowing the One that this individual mind, life, body, soul can know itself or its action —Thus ignorance of self is the nature of our mind, but an ignorance full of the impulse towards self-possession and self-knowledge A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of man the mental being.

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Chapter XXXII

The Integral Knowledge

ARGUMENT

The ignorance in which we live is a sevenfold self-ignorance; an ignorance of the Absolute and knowledge only of the relations of being and becoming; an ignorance of our timeless and immutable self-existence and knowledge only of the cosmic becoming; an ignorance of our cosmic self and knowledge only of our egoistic existence; an ignorance of our eternal becoming in Time and knowledge only of the one life present to our memory; an ignorance of our larger and complex being in the world and knowledge only of our surface waking existence; an ignorance of the higher principles of our existence and knowledge only of the life, mind and body; an ignorance therefore of the right law and enjoyment of living and a knowledge only of the confused strife of the dualities —Our conception of the Ignorance determines our conception of the knowledge and by that of the aim of our existence, which coincides with the ideal of the earlier Vedic thought —We confirm by it our rejection of the extreme views which hold the absolute Non-existence or absolute Existence to be alone true and the relative world of being and becoming an ignorance to be renounced There is the unmanifest Absolute and there is its manifestation; to fulfil the manifestation and live in the sense of it as the Absolute manifesting himself is the Knowledge —We reject the view that regards the One, Infinite, Formless, Spirit, Superconscient as the sole truth and the opposite terms as unreal or eventually false and vain values to be abandoned We accept it and them also not as alternates, but as simultaneous values of the manifestation and their union in our consciousness and right use of their relations as the knowledge

Chapter XXXII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised and enlarged in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part II, Chapter XV, “Reality and the Integral Knowledge"  

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—We reject equally the views that affirm a pluralistic Becoming without Being or see Mind, Life or Matter as the original principle, and we reject the limitation to our apparent Nature which is their practical conclusion Becoming as the working out of the energies of Being, Mind, Life and Matter as inferior terms of the higher divine Nature to be illumined, uplifted, transformed by the higher terms is our view of the knowledge —We reject also intermediate theories like that which makes God and cosmos one, —perceiving as we do that cosmos exists in God who exceeds it and not God by the cosmos, —or like that which seeks to abandon the earth and find fulfilment only in heavens where the Many enjoy the presence of the One, —perceiving, as we do, that there is a higher knowledge which leads to complete identity and that divine life based upon it need not be confined to heavens beyond, but may embrace the earth also —Ignorance is an initial state of knowledge, the essence of which is to create a sense of limitation and division; it is this which we have to overcome and transcend without creating an opposite self-limitation The integral aim of our existence can only be the possession and power and joy of our integral self-knowledge.

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Chapter XXXIII

The Progress to Knowledge

ARGUMENT

To rise out of the sevenfold Ignorance into the integral Knowledge is the progress of man’s being; it is to grow in all his complex existence and consciousness into the full possession and enjoyment of his whole and his true being —He starts with three categories, himself, Nature or cosmos and God, and though he tries to deny any two of these in order to affirm the third only, he cannot really succeed; for he is neither separate nor sufficient to himself, cosmos also is not sufficient to itself, but points always to an infinite, one and absolute behind it, and to affirm the Absolute to the exclusion of these two others leaves man unsatisfied and cosmos unexplained —In affirming himself man has first to put himself in front and act and feel as if God and the world existed for him and were less important to him than himself; this is his egoistic phase necessary to disengage his individuality out of Nature and as if against her and to bring it out into force and capacity He has to affirm himself in the Ignorance before he can perfect himself in the Knowledge Afterwards he has to seek for himself in Nature and God and others, but it is still himself that he seeks to know and possess and his own perfection or salvation which is his motive —In the progressive enlargement of his knowledge he gets rid of his sevenfold ignorance; of the temporal by growing into his eternal being with its pre-existence and subsequent existence in Time; of the psychological by enlarging his self-knowing beyond the waking self into the subconscient and superconscient; of the constitutional by realising his spiritual being and its categories; of the cosmic by discovering his timeless self; of the egoistic by

Chapter XXXIII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939 ­ 40, becoming the present Book Two, Part II, Chapter XVII, “The Progress to Knowledge —God, Man and Nature"  

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realising the cosmic consciousness; of the original by opening to the Absolute of whom Self, individual and Nature are so many faces —At the same time he realises the unity of himself and Nature in the first three steps of knowledge, of himself and God in the others; of himself with all beings relatively in Nature and absolutely in God; of God and Nature because it is the Self who has become all these beings and the nature of the Lord which is apparent in cosmos —The knowledge of Nature leads him to the same results as soon as he goes beyond Matter and Life to Mind; for he discovers a subconscient and superconscient, a soul in Matter, and perceives a supernature in which he realises the Self, the Spirit, the Absolute —In the quest of God he begins by seeing him through Nature and himself, crudely and obscurely at first, till he finds more luminously the one Truth behind all religions; for all seize on the Divine in many aspects and their variety is necessary in order that man should come to know God entirely —When he arrives at the unity of his knowledge of God, man and Nature, he has the complete knowledge, the sense and goal of humanity’s progress and labour and the sure foundation of all perfections and all harmonies.

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APPENDIX I

Chapter I

The Human Aspiration

ARGUMENT IN BRIEF

A search for God, (for a spiritual or divine Reality within oneself and behind, above or within the phenomenon of existence,) for perfection, for freedom, for an absolute Truth and Bliss, for immortality has been the persistent preoccupation of the highest human thought since the earliest times This preoccupation seems to be a perpetual element in man’s nature; for it survives the longest periods of scepticism.

This aspiration is in contradiction with his present existence and normal experience of himself which is that of a mortal being full of imperfections, ego-ridden, largely animal, subject to transitory joys and much pain and suffering, bound by mechanical necessity But the direct contradiction between what he is and what he seeks to be need not be a final argument against the validity of his aspiration For such contradictions are part of Nature’s general method; the aspiration may be realisable either by a revolutionary individual effort or by an evolutionary general progress.

The problems of existence are problems of harmony Discords and disorder of the materials, oppositions, demand a solution by accordance, by the discovery of a harmony Thus the accordance of an inanimation and inertia in a containing Matter and the active indwelling stress of Life is Nature’s first problem, its initial difficulty; its perfect solution would be immortality in a material body The accordance of an unconscious Matter and

In December 1940 Sri Aurobindo wrote an “Argument in Brief” and a shorter summary of Book One, Chapter I of the revised Life Divine Around the same time he drafted a summary of Book One, Chapter XXIV These summaries, similar to the “arguments” published in the Arya, are reproduced here from his manuscripts  

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an unconscious or half-conscious Life with a conscious Mind and Will is her second problem; the possession of a direct and perfect instrumentation of knowledge in a living body would be its complete solution The accordance of a mortal mind, life and body with a secretly indwelling immortal spirit is the final problem; the spiritualisation or divinisation of mind, life and body, a divine life, would be the perfect solution The search after these solutions by the human being is not irrational; it is rather the very effort and striving of Nature within him.

Life appears in Matter, Mind in Life because they are already there Matter is a form of veiled Life; Life a form of veiled Mind; Mind may well be a form and veil of a higher power, the Spirit, which is supramental in its nature . Nature has implanted an impulse towards life in certain forms of Matter and evolves it there, a similar evolutionary impulse towards mind in certain forms of life, an impulse in certain minds towards what is beyond Mind, towards the unveiling of Spirit, the evolution of a spiritual being Each impulse justifies itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties.

There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organisation or status of existence as final The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature

SHORTER SYNOPSIS OF THE CHAPTER

Man’s highest aspiration has been always a seeking for God, perfection, freedom, an absolute truth and bliss, immortality.

A direct contradiction exists between this aspiration and his present state of mortality, imperfection, bondage to mechanical necessity, ego and animality.

This contradiction between what he is now and what he seeks to be is not a final argument against his aspiration Contradictions are part of Nature’s method; the aspiration may be achievable by individual effort or by an evolutionary progress  

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The problems of existence are problems of harmony.

The accordance of an active life-principle with the inanimate Matter containing it is Nature’s first evolutionary problem; its complete solution would be immortality in the body.

The accordance of conscious mind with an unconscious matter and half-conscious life is her second evolutionary problem; a direct and perfect instrumentation of knowledge in a living body would be its complete solution.

The accordance of immortal spirit with a mortal mind, life and body is her third and final problem; its complete solution would be the evolution of a divine being and a divine nature.

As Nature has implanted the impulse to life in matter, to mind in life, so she has implanted in mind the impulse towards the evolution of what is beyond mind, spiritual, supramental Each impulse justifies itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties.

The animal is a laboratory in which she has worked out man; man may be a laboratory in which she wills to work out the superman, the being of a divine nature.

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APPENDIX II

Chapter XXIV

Matter

Life then is not an inexplicable dream or impossible evil; it is a force of being, a pulsation of the divine All-existence capable of divine outflowering But there still remains the problem of Matter.

This problem is of a fundamental importance For all here, mind, life, body, depend on Matter, evolve out of it; Matter is their support, conditions their emergence and action Man rose out of the animal by developing a body capable of a progressive mental illumination; to rise beyond himself to a divine manhood or supermanhood he must develop a physical instrumentation or body capable of a still greater supramental illumination.

But the body seems to be from the beginning the soul’s great obstacle Its opposition is a compelling cause of asceticism and of the condemnation put by most religions upon Matter.

The conflict begins with Life and increases as higher principles evolve There is a discord between Life and Matter ending in death, the defeat of Life; but really there is a constant compromise, Life using Matter and even death for its own continuance: Mind struggles with the limitations of life and matter, and there is a half victory, a constant compromise When spirit wakens to itself it finds itself hampered by mind, life and body, oppressed by its instruments The solution proposed is to carry this discord to its logical conclusion Life rejects body, mind rejects life, the spirit abandons its instruments and departs from world into its own infinity.

This solution is not a solution, it is only the individual’s escape from the problem; the labour of the world and its discord continues But if Sachchidananda is the world’s indwelling reality, discord cannot be the fundamental principle The real  

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solution must be a true and complete conquest and taking up of body by life, of life by mind, of all three by the spirit.

This can seem possible only when we have found the real truth of Matter as of Soul, Mind and Life As Life is found to be force of Spirit, and Mind to be consciousness of Spirit, so Matter is found to be body and substance of Spirit.

Matter as a thing in itself is non-existent What we see of it is a form or forms created by a particular relation between our sense-experience and the all-existence in which we move Science discovers that Matter resolves into forms of Energy; Philosophy discovers that Matter is only a substantial appearance and the one reality is Spirit But what brings about this phenomenon of forms of Energy or this appearance of Spirit?

There should be only states of spirit or currents of Energy; whence these phenomena of forms? It can be attributed to an action of consciousness, an intervention of Mind, —sense-mind creates the forms it seems to perceive; Thought works upon them and gives them their values But the embodied individual thought or sense which thus conceives or perceives is itself a creation and cannot be the creator There must be a universal Mind not known to us because subconscious to us in the form of the universe, superconscious to us in the spirit Such a universal Mind may have determined and constructed the relations of form with form and the rhythms of the universe¹

But how is this done?

Existence in its activity is a Consciousness-Force which presents the workings of its Force to its consciousness as forms of being The Force of Existence of the one sole conscious being can by its workings produce no results that are not forms of that Being Matter as substance of forms must then be itself a form or substance of spirit; it can be nothing else.

The appearances it assumes, the phenomena of Matter are the result of the dividing action of Mind Consciousness

1 The embodied individual mind is a surface fragmentation of the universal consciousness repeating by its perceptions this creation and so by a sort of reflection creating for its own thought and sense its own perceptual and conceptual universe  

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descending from Supermind appears as Mind, an inferior power of Supermind, Force appears as Life, an energy instrumental to Mind; Mind descending into Life becomes by involution in it subconscient and gives to the material workings of Life the appearance of inconscience The inconscience, inertia, atomic disaggregation of Matter is due to this involved action of Mind The creative life-energy of Mind involved in Matter and there turned into what appears to us as an inconscient material Energy gives to form or substance of being on which it works the aspect of inconscience Mind here is a first action of Supermind in the involutionary descent working in these conditions, separated from the Supermind, Life is a similar action of Force of Being, Matter the form taken by Being itself as a result of this working

The fragmentation of Matter is due to the dividing action of Mind which does not abrogate the essential unity of Existence The object is to push the principle of Multiplicity in the One to its extreme which can only be done by division and separativeness of consciousness and of form For an awareness of things from separate centres of consciousness is meant to be the basic experience of existence here The movement of Mind the dividing principle makes the knower regard the forms of his own universal being as other than he, but it has also a movement of union which heals this phenomenal division In divine Mind the two actions are simultaneous and prevent the division from being real In ignorant or involved Mind the division seems real; the movement towards union becomes a contact of consciousness and primarily a contact of sense Material substance is the form in which Mind acting through sense contacts being as object, —as a general object, a mass of objective existence and a multitude of objects in that mass of being

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