Narad’s
Arrival at Madra by RY Deshpande is a
book based on the opening passage of 81 lines of the Book of Fate of Savitri. It has, inter alia, aspects of
this evolutionary creation of ours advancing towards what Sri Aurobindo
envisaged as the supramental manifestation in plenitudes of the transcendental reality.
Chapters XII-XVI of the book see
the related issues from various angles. These are as follows:
·
The Story of
Creation
·
Evolution—Scientific
and Occult-Yogic Aspects
·
Evolution—A
Metaphysical Discussion
·
Evolution—The
Spiritual-Gnostic Possibilities
·
Towards the
Intermediate Race
The expectation is that these themes will be of
considerable interest to the readers of the Mirror
of Tomorrow and therefore it is thought quite pertinent to post them on it.
The book was published in April 2006 under the auspices of the Sri Aurobindo
International Centre of Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and it is heartening
to see that it has been received enthusiastically in the Aurobindonian circles.
It is now hoped that it will, through the Internet, become accessible to a much
wider readership which can see the process and objective of the terrestrial
evolution in terms of spiritual verities. Such an interest in it could be particularly
rewarding because of the deep and fundamental positions that are available to
the discernible and the perceptive; these will make them aware of the thousandfold
possibilities of the spirit entering into this creation, the growing
possibilities that can, in fact which must come into the operative dynamics of the
earthly scheme. Going beyond the immediate intellectual-intuitive grasp of the
issues involved in it are the profounder things of the occult-yogic kind and to
be aware of them and to participate in them as far as possible to us is to
prepare ourselves in the greatness of what they hold for us. It is with this
view in mind that I am posting these five chapters as a set of articles one
after another.
The Story of
Creation
Ramakrishna Paramhansa made young unenthusiastic
Vivekananda read out to him the Vedantic treatise Aşţāvakra Samhitā.
Later the disciple was happy to have gone through the work, to the extent that
he expounded its doctrines in his own way. The work perhaps belongs to the much
later period when post-Buddhist philosophies had started appearing on the scene
in
na prithvī na jalam nāgnirna vāyurdyaurna vā bhavān
eşām sākşiņamātmānam chidrūpam viddhi muktaye
“You are neither earth nor water nor fire nor air nor the
celestial sky. Only by knowing the Self as the witness and all these as the
forms of Consciousness can there be freedom.” Thus the path indicated is
detachment from the body and reposing in the Consciousness alone. It is
maintained that this phenomenal world is a creation of Maya—“the principle of
unreason, the fountainhead of irrationality, the Enchantress of infinite
resources.” The inevitable culmination of this Vedantic approach is “you are
not the body nor the body yours, na tvam dého na té dého.” Janaka is
satisfied and, receiving the knowledge, asks: “Where are the elements, where is
the body? where the existence? where the non-existence?” and do they disappear
at all and, if so, where? They cannot; but the Purusha or the Soul or the Being
behind them withdraws the sanction and they remain inactive.
The Spirit presents itself in the double aspect of
Being and Force. The omnipresent Being and the omnipotent Consciousness-Force
are there everywhere. Together they support and promote this creation teeming
with countless worlds, including the evolutionary world. If they were not there
nothing would have been possible, nothing done, nothing achieved; without the
Being Consciousness-Force would not have existed and without
Consciousness-Force the Being would have remained unmanifest. Founded on Truth
and unfolding in the Delight of Existence, they take in their vast creative
play different positions in different locations, have several loci in space and
time which themselves define a world or loka, a universe existing with
its own set of parameters. Thus the counterparts of the omnipresent Being and
the omnipotent Consciousness-Force in the non-existent status of the Eternal
the Brahman, in the strange but gainful wideness of the Nothing are the
Inconscient Self and the Somnambulist Force. In that poise the “being sleeps
unconscious of his thought” and she the force “builds the world knowing not
what she builds”. In the Vedic description, he is the eighth son whom Aditi
left here when with the others she returned to heaven. Of the Puranas, he is
the inconscient Vishnu, the dark Shiva, the Achetana Purusha; he is the Shadow
Being, Chhaya Purusha. There is this “long gigantic pause” of his existence
with she yet standing ever behind him.
In most of the metaphysical
systems concerned with the aspects of many worlds or lokas or the planes
of existence, the formulations are essentially based on the universal Self or
the Atman with not much importance being given to the dynamic working Force or
the manifesting Shakti. Even in the Gita, not that the role of Nature or
Prakriti is not dwelt upon; but significance of the threefold Purusha is what
stands out most prominently in it. There is a serious danger also of exclusive
focusing of attention on the static aspect alone, leading to the illusory
nature of this material creation. In the other extreme situation of admitting
everything as the work of Nature or Prakriti only, there is a real fear of the
things of the spirit becoming insubstantial and imaginary. But in the working
of the creation the static without the dynamic remains incomplete, as much as
it is the other way around also. In the Transcendent these two are Presence and
Power in one which in the language of the Gita is the supreme Purusha or Uttama
Purusha with his own supreme Prakriti, Para Prakriti. There they are one, a
single supreme Person who is himself and is all, “transforming all experience
to delight”; it is his power that reveals divinity, works in divinity. But here
they are “too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts”. However, for things to
change here, that power living upon the heights must act, bring into life’s
closed room the Immortal’s air and fill the finite with the Infinite. Indeed,
all here bears witness to his secret might and in all we feel the presence
because of this power; it must become an overt working.[1] Purusha-Prakriti,
Brahman-Maya, Ishwara-Ishwari, Atman-Chetana, Shiva-Shakti are the pairs by
which the omnipresent Self and the omnipotent Consciousness-Force are known in
their several functional attributes and roles. They take different poises in
different worlds. About the Two-in-One we have the experience of Aswapati
described in Savitri as follows:
Along a road of pure interior light,
Alone between tremendous Presences,
Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,
His soul passed on, a single conscious power…
To the source of all things human and divine.
There he beheld in their mighty union's poise
The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls,
Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;
Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world. [2]
In Sri Aurobindo’s World Game the Ishwara tells
the Ishwari that the game is well worth the toil whose end is her divine
embrace:
The worlds are only a playfield of Thou-I and a hued
mask of the Two-One,
I am in thee as thou art in me, O Love; we are closer
than heart and breast;
From thee I leaped forth struck to a spirit spark, I
mount back in the soul’s fire;
To our motion the stars whirl in the swing of Time, our
oneness is Nature’s rest. [3]
It is in joy of creation that
the glad work of the Presence and the Power together goes on.
If progressive unfolding and
self-manifestation of the non-manifest Godhead is the mark of this creation,
then the Presence serves as the ground of existence and the Power as the
dynamic executive force; it is he who supports and gives rise to all that
exists and it is she who accomplishes all that is willed by him. One is support
or foundation or ādhāra and the other is dynamism or action or krīyā.
There is a twofold movement characterising the entire long process, a series of
descents and a series of ascents, a double ladder on which continuously can the
traffic move upward and downward. On each rung of the ladder are beings living
in their distinctive typal modes of their own consciousness; it constitutes a
hierarchy of interminable worlds, a magnificent scheme of hypostasis. In the
sequence of such self-limiting descents everything comes from the supreme
Being, emanates from him making whatever emanates from him ontologically
inferior to him. There is indeed an endless chain of devolutions, terminating
finally into total involution, an intended fruitful Void, Shunya. Each
hypostasis forming a world has its own personality that serves as its central
being, its presiding deity. Such is one of the themes of the Perennial Philosophy
holding the concept of the Great Chain of Being, a succession of realities.
Each hypostasis supports the creation beneath it, the creation which it itself
gives rise to. Plotinus, who perhaps coined the term ‘hypostasis’, thinks of
only three. The Trinity of Christianity, trīkāyā or three bodies of the
Buddha, tanazzulut
or descents
of Sufism are some of the theological descriptions of
hypostasis. In Tantrik traditions it is the unitary Shiva-Shakti principle that
is the originator of this vast multiplicity. In the Puranic phrase we can say
that these countless hypostases are born in the Tapas of Brahma, by the force
of intense ingathering or absorption, by the process of exclusive concentration
on particular aspects to bring about a given creation or world; in the reverse
upward movement it is the Yoga of Prakriti founded on and supported by the
existential reality, sanctioned by the governing Purusha or Being, that the
creation marches on its high-climbing path. The descent is by the Tapas, ascent
by Yoga. Many are the poises of the
conscious Being, Purusha; he is the Self, he is the author and the architect,
he is the witness, he is the support, he is the lord and enjoyer of the forms
and works of Nature. The supreme Self in its essential character, even when
involved and identified with its universal and individual becomings, remains
transcendental; so too does the Purusha characteristically universal-individual
and intimately connected with Prakriti or Nature, even when separated from her.
But manifestation always remains the work of Prakriti.
“Reality in itself is that to which one can only point
but which cannot be described. Since this reality is beyond description
and beyond conception, it does not have a symbol. Yet we might speak of it
positively as pure being, or as infinite, non-dual consciousness, or as
infinite bliss. It can also be described negatively as void, emptiness,
absence of qualities and limits, śunyatā. Both descriptions are valid and both
are incomplete. But when the Godhead expresses itself it takes on different
modes or hypostases, according to the degree of expression. This is the
‘Logos’, the Dynamic or Truth Consciousness. Here we have the realm of Divine
Archetypes, the eternal Nous or Divine Mind, which embodies the dynamic
non-dual Truth. In both traditional and esoteric theology, this
hypostasis is represented as the ‘The Logos’, a term that dates back to Philo
of Alexandria and was adopted by Christianity. But the clearest and most
detailed description is by Sri Aurobindo, who uses the term Supermind. In fact,
his entire teaching revolves around the actualisation of this divine
consciousness within the material world. The Kosmos or Manifest Existence is the multiverse or super-Cosmos in
all its infinite diversity. At the ‘bottom’ of the Kosmos the emanated
Light of the lowest hypostases disappears, and there is only formless ‘matter’,
which the Neoplatonists call hyle
(‘earth’, ‘matter’), the Kabbalists refer to as klippot (‘husk’ of creation), Sri Aurobindo
calls ‘the Inconscient’. This is the maximum point of involution. However, even
the maximum involution, obscurity, and inconscience is just as much a
derivative, an expression of the Absolute as the ‘positive’ pole of
superconsciousness and noetic divinity and godhead.” [4]
All manifestation is supported by being, but
consciousness-force fixes its character; as is the status of consciousness, so
becomes the status of being. Even the Inconscient is presence and power of the
Involved. In it being is plunged into another and opposite state of
non-manifestation resembling non-existence; there works the force that out of
it all in the material universe may be manifested. This is a dark reflection of
the superconscient where consciousness is taken up into an absolute of being:
there is a superconscient status in which consciousness seems to be luminously
involved in being and as if unaware of itself. All consciousness of being, all
knowledge, self-vision, force of being, seem to emerge from that involved
state, seem to appear in it: this emergence and appearance may seem to be a
lesser reality, but both the superconscience and the consciousness are the same
Real and they both regard the same Real. There is also a status of the Supreme
in which no distinction can be made between being and consciousness—they are
too much one there to be thus differentiated; but this supreme status of being
is also a supreme status of the power of being and therefore of the power of
consciousness: the force of being and the force of consciousness are one there
and they cannot be separated. It is this unification of eternal Being with the
eternal Consciousness-Force that is the status of the supreme Ishwara. The
force of this eternal Being is the dynamis of the Absolute. Such a status of
the Supreme is not a negation of cosmos; it carries in itself the essence and
power of all cosmic existence. [5] But, in contrast to that transcendental
status, being and consciousness-force in cosmic manifestation are not always in
that identity, being preferring to stand aside for the consciousness-force to
work out things here. Forward movement on the being’s neutral and passive
ground has to come from the consciousness-force.
Reflection of the transcendental Brahman upon the Void
has its corresponding result; it throws its nil-spirited shadow in order to
work out the miracle of manifestation. The two passive and dynamic aspects of
the negative Brahman, the Truth’s thick shadow thrown upon the Void, the Shadow
of the Eternal himself, are what we see as inconscient Self and somnambulist
Force. In contrast to the two luminous poises of the superconscient Brahman,
there is the dark static extension, the dark passive Brahman, the dark spectre
of the Self, and there is the dynamic part of the Shade, the unresting dark
Brahman, the blind unknowing Force. To put it somewhat differently, Tapas and
Dance of the dark Shiva are materially and meaningfully present here with
infinite potentialities, bringing out, albeit negatively, greatnesses of the
terrifying Void as if it were meant to be a device to give shape to some
concealed truth-idea lying in its secret depth. So Narad, on his way to
Aswapati’s Madra, even as he crosses the soul-space and steps into gross
material things, witnesses a thousand inventions of this mysterious sombre
Creator, of the obscure unbreathing Brahman: he views the blank inconscient
Self and the somnambulist Force in their well designed well intended
functioning.
But how do the inconscient Self and the somnambulist
Force work, if we are to suppose that ‘work’ is possible in their somnolence
and inconscience? and what do they intend to achieve if we are to grant that
they are involved in some well intended action? and then is it something that
happens out of their own self-will, or is there something that is imposed upon
them? and all this exactly for what purpose, assuming that there is a purpose
behind this entire movement? By the very connotation of the terms unawareness
and inactivity, all this might appear to be paradoxical, if not confusing and
contradictory. Yet this status of somnolence and inconscience, of unawareness
and inactivity could be a functional status, with a mechanism by which what is
to be can emerge from what presently is not; it could be the beginning of
becoming striving towards another greatness of the Great. “I want to be
many”—that is the ancient revelation: the ancient creator setting himself to
bring out of the Non-manifest a willed manifestation in self-luminous
ever-growing possibilities of the Spirit, one Nothingness projecting itself
upon another Nothingness in order to be divinely many. From the bright womb of
Nothingness, brahmayoni, comes out Nothingness in order to be Something
in its joyous forms of wonder. Towards this objective, Nothingness adopts its
starting poise of inconscience and somnambulism, with sufficient urging will
implanted in the secret depth.
The emergence of this urging will purports the entire
sense of this creation on earth, the birth of the divine Something. To begin
with, it might appear rather indistinct, without texture of form or
definiteness of aim, and at the same time without the certitude of any success
in its endeavour, a blind attempt in the enormity of every opposition that can
spring up from its own unknown or unknowing action; it might even be a dream, a
hallucination, an imagination, an illusion. It might look as though a builder
is building a structure without even knowing what he is building; but then even
in that act he must be experiencing a joy, the joy of surprise, the joy of the
unexpected that can bring about marvels of the Spirit. It can be multiply rich
and creative. But what could be the process, and what the impulse? It consists
of self-concealing and self-discovery:
A traveller new-discovering himself,
One made of Matter’s world his starting-point,
He made of Nothingness his living-room
And Night a process of the eternal light
And death a spur towards immortality.
God wrapped his head from sight in Matter’s cowl,
His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,
All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;
Infinity wore a boundless zero’s form.
His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,
Eternity a blank spiritual Vast. [6]
Out of this zero’s form arose Matter whose materiality
presents itself to us in terms of response to the sense. This has the effect to
make our consciousness dwell upon it. But there is an ascending series of
substance, from material substance going all the way up to spiritual and higher
transcendental substance. At the gross physical level Consciousness-Force
masses itself more and more to resist and stand out against other masses of the
same Consciousness-Force. In sharp contrast to it, upon the Substance of the
Spirit pure Consciousness images itself freely with an essential indivisibility
and a constant unifying interchange. All phenomenal existence resolves itself
into Force, explains Sri Aurobindo, into a movement of energy that assumes more
or less material, more or less gross or subtle forms for self-presentation to
its own experience. But in the first place how at all did this movement arise
when it is so paradoxical for Inconscience to initiate it? by what mysterious
impulsion? If it were only the Inconscience without energy howsoever blind it
be, then this forward movement would not have arisen. But it occurs principally
because everywhere, even in Inconscience, Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva
and Shakti, Brahma and Maya, conceptive and creative faculties, presence and
power are essentially one and inseparable; ever together they coexist,
everywhere, though in operative modes they might take different poises, as
indeed they do. This Force inherent in Existence may be at rest or it may be in
motion yet these two, rest and motion, are not self-exclusive; if the Force is
at rest, it is in the dynamism of the Truth as much as it is so even when it is
in motion. Force cannot be self-motivating without the Self. [7]
We have in Savitri an elaborate and enthralling
description of the play of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic scheme of
functioning, the play on its way towards the appearance of newer faculties of
the Spirit here.
All here where each thing seems its lonely self
Are figures of the sole transcendent One:
Only by him they are, his breath is their life;
An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.
A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game,
One came upon the dubious whirling globe
To hide from her pursuit in force and form.
A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,
A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,
He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe…
He is the substance, he the self of things;
She has forged from him her works of skill and might…
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met…
Here on the earth where we must fill our parts…
She has concealed her glory and her bliss
And disguised the Love and Wisdom in her heart…
He too wears a diminished Godhead here;
He has forsaken his omnipotence,
His calm he has foregone and infinity…
Although possessor of the earth and heavens,
He leaves to her the cosmic management
And watches all, the Witness of her scene…
He leans on her for all he does and is:
He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days…
In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs…
This whole wide world is only he and she…
The Two who are one are the secret of all power,
The Two who are one are the might and right in things.
His soul, silent, supports the world and her…
Active, inspired by her he speaks and moves…
His journey through the days is her sun-march;
He runs upon her roads; hers is his course…
Her empire in the cosmos she has built,
He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws…
In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,
In the insoluble riddle of her play,
A creature made of perishable stuff,
In the pattern she has set for him he moves,
He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom
heaves…
But conquering her, then is he most her slave;
He is her dependent, all his means are hers;
Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.
At last he wakes to a memory of Self:
He sees within the face of deity,
The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:
Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate…
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
The Spirit, the innumerable One,
He has left behind his lone eternity,
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
Her finite’s multitude in an infinite Space.
The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide and seek with his own Force;
In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God. [8]
In the Vedic image Aditi is the infinite Mother, the
Cow unslayable, supreme Nature or infinite Consciousness, the Mother of things
taking form on the seven planes of her world-action as energy of conscious
being, and the Purusha is the Bull, Vrishabha. [9] They become here lower
Purusha and Prakriti.
The entire purpose with which Purusha and Prakriti, or
Being and Nature, are occupied is to uphold and promote this vast cosmic order
and functioning. It is because there is the secret God behind all activities of
Nature that Nature can engage herself in the complex and difficult evolutionary
task. But what is the nature of this task? What is the issue involved? Firstly,
it should be recognised that in a conscious existence which is absolute,
independent of its formations, not determined by its works, there has to be an
inherent freedom to manifest or not to manifest the potentiality of movement.
This is just the Prerogative of the Absolute—by its very definition; to
manifest or not to manifest wholly or partially is the subject of the creator’s
will and pleasure, his samkalpa and his ānanda, and that cannot be questioned. It is in that inherent
freedom to manifest or not to manifest can be accounted the movement of the
Force. Further, if Existence is conscious Being, it could for certain purposes
be subject to its nature of Force. Such is the cosmic God of the Tantriks
subject to Shakti, of the Mayavadins to Maya, he involved in Maya or controlled
by Shakti; in the Sankhya tradition Purusha leaves to Prakriti the cosmic
management and watches all, the Witness of her scene. [10]
Let us see this Purusha-Prakriti functioning in the
context of Narad’s visit to Aswapati, with the mission of delivering the Word
of Fate to Savitri. This Word has the power to bring closer to this world what
is held by it as luminous possibilities of the future. Not only that; it
prepares the present towards their realisation. While crossing the regions of
Mind into material things Narad sees,
Amid the inventions of the inconscient Self
And the workings of a blind somnambulist Force,
the Godward progress this creation is making. Narad
attained communion with Matter and identified himself with the dumb Spirit. He
saw the eternal labour of the Gods and marked the advance that has been made in
the arrival of beasts and men. In that mood
He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,
Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does,
All shaping without will or thought or sense,
Its blind unerring occult mystery,
And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality…
He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss.
There is an occult mystery of the Inconscience’ secret
self and of the omnipotent power, though ignorant and blind, shaping things
without thought or will or sense. But are the secret self and the omnipotent
power inherent in the Inconscience sufficient in themselves to lead the
evolutionary travail towards the glory and marvel as its beautiful reward, they
in the eagerness of God waiting to be born? If this Inconscience is the last
stage of the divine hypostasis, can it automatically become capable of bringing
out such divine wonders? But the fact is that, by the very definition, no
hypostasis can initiate such a movement by itself. Also, then, what about the
countless intermediate hypostases, if such a movement were possible? should
they not be endowed with similar faculties, each one leading to its own kind of
glory and marvel? But, more importantly, no reverse evolutionary movement can
begin by itself, although there is the Force present in the Inconscience,
howsoever blind that Force might be. Or else, should one affirm that the last
hypostasis of complete involution is the sine quo non for the evolution
to begin, as is actually the case, that evolution cannot start from any of
these intermediate hypostases? If it were not so, what would have come would
not have been really a new creation. Indeed, we can say that a hypostasis is
nothing but a formation of a certain world or loka, a world of typal
beings without the evolutionary possibility. For a genuine new creation to
arrive and be established here, the Infinite must exhaust itself completely,
must empty itself out fully and become the total Void, the absolute Zero or
Shunya. Such a Zero alone could be the pregnant womb for the emergence of the
truest glory and marvel presented to us in Narad’s song. Evolution from the
inconscient stage, after the total involution, is not just a possibility but it
is the only possibility that can bear the divine fruit.
But it should be well understood also that evolution is
not simply a mechanical reversal of all that has happened in the downward fall
into involution. No creator would indulge himself in such an unexciting and
monotonous prospect which has no surprises in it, no new challenges to meet
whatever be the progression or process. Actually, involution-evolution is not
just a clockwork system running back and forth, as many times as one would like
it to run, not that simply key it up and the whole sequence would in a merry
way unroll repeatedly. There is a will behind it, but it is not a programmed
will to neatly hit in a businesslike manner set targets. Evolution is not a return
lap along which one sees the same landscapes, cross through the same
countryside, play movie track in the reverse, encounter same situations or meet
dangers. Indeed, the arduous and painful evolutionary segment is full of
unknown dangers and slippery possibilities, not new or additional or extra
dangers, but dangers of the unexpected that spring up from darkness of the
creative abyss, apart from dangers as if they were there down the involutionary
track; but dangers can never be there in a movement based on complete freedom,
a movement whose direct source is the Divine himself. As a matter of fact,
involution-evolution is one single great process, one forward movement
formulated or devised to accomplish the Divine’s will to manifest. This
portends to a yet deeper occult mystery which is nowhere a part of all these
thousand hypostases. That mystery is the divine’s “Love that broods within the
dim abyss”, as Narad sings in the context of “the Inconscient and its secret
self, its power omnipotent knowing not what it does”. But then what is this
Love which alone in Truth and Beauty and Joy completes the terms of the
inconscient Self and the somnambulist Force? Being and Force without Love
cannot by themselves initiate evolution.
Possibly we might get some idea about it by looking
into some aspects of the process of the creation itself. This is concerned with
a series of descents and not just with a single cluster of hypostases by which
the Absolute arrives at the gainful Nothing. There are descents and descents
after the first descent. In them further advancements are made after the first
plunge had been taken. The sequence could be something like this: to begin
with, there is only the Absolute, the Nothing, the avyakta, the Non-manifest. It takes the first step towards another
avyakta, the Unmanifest, as if of the
opposite kind, which can give rise to the evolutionary vyakta, the Manifest as it shall be. It is that which justifies the
Buddhist conception of the Void giving rise to these million shapes and forms,
these countless teeming worlds. But up to now it remains immobile and
actionless, in its state of inconscience and somnambulism. Unfoldment of the
meaningful terrestrial creation from this state has still to be worked out; but
can it happen by itself? No, it cannot; but it can happen with the plunge of
Love in the horror of this Inconscience.
The Mother narrates, in the manner of a story, the
process of creation. She takes care to say that it is simply a way of seeing
things and cannot be taken in the literal sense. It helps, by re-living in it,
to understand the how and the why of all that is: “When the Supreme decided to
exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in
Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to
create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the
supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the
expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom which seemed to be
the most interesting feature of this creation. So intermediaries were needed to
express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four beings were at first
emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive
objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These
Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light,
Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth... As soon as they set to work—they had their
own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it
independently... . As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential
cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what
had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into
darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth
into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in
separation and disorder.” [11]
But then there were many successive involutions, rather
descents, in Matter. The Gods come much later on the scene. The Mother speaks
of the descent of the Divine Love into Matter because of which the evolutionary
unfoldment in Matter has become a possibility: “...Consciousness became
inconscience... so total that no contact seemed possible between the Origin and
what was created. And this total inconscience made a direct descent necessary,
without passing through the intermediate regions, a direct descent of the
divine Consciousness in its form of Love. And it is this descent of Divine Love
into matter, penetrating it and adding a new element to its composition, which
has made possible the ascent, slow for us, but an uninterrupted ascent, from
inconscience to consciousness and from darkness to light.” [12]
We cannot say it is salvaging a situation that had
arisen as if by a peculiar accident. If this was an accident, then it was a
willed accident, a fruitful accident to give rise to a creation emerging out of
the Great Nothing, out of the Inconscience. What more wonderful a possibility
there could have been! The delight itself! And this delight worked itself out
in full freedom and in the truth of its own joy. We may therefore call this
creation adbhuta, marvellous; also
that which cannot be derived from any more fundamental entity, which has no
other elemental origin, which is ādi
bhūta; nothing existed prior to it. It is only now that all these varying
countless elements have started appearing. The possibility of the Infinite is
now multiplying itself infinitely—to such an extent that even the very opposite
of its truth is allowed to have its sway in the process. The Being of Falsehood
and the Being of Death are the ones who dominate the present evolutionary
scene. As long as these beings exist there will be difficulties, says the
Mother. That is the occult problem which has to be solved. But Narad’s song
hintingly foretells of such a solution.
In this chain of happenings when did the material world
arise? Subsequent to the appearance of the Inconscience—there is a great gulf
between Inconscience and Matter. Matter is already an advanced state, a
wonderful formation coming out of the absented Consciousness. The Mother
explains: “When, precisely, the Consciousness ‘began’ its creation... the first
manifestation of the creative Consciousness was just an emanation of
consciousness—of conscious light—and when this emanation separated itself from
its origin, the Inconscient was born... Consequently, the birth of the
Inconscient is prior to the formation of the world, and it was only when the
perception came that the whole universe was going to be created uselessly that
there was a call and Divine Love plunged into the Inconscient to change it into
consciousness. Therefore, it can be said that the formation of the material
worlds as we know them is the result of the descent of the supreme
Consciousness into the Inconscient.” [13]
About the first separation and the appearance of the
four opposite powers, we have a very vivid description in Savitri. It is the Sacrifice of the Purusha, the abandoning of the
triple Splendour by the Supreme, that alone could dissolve the ignominy of the
Nothingness, that alone could meet the opposition which arose out of the
emanated powers’ deliberate distancing of themselves from the Origin:
In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being’s night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,
Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,
God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness
Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.
A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.
In a mysterious dispensation’s law
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game. [14]
“Which came first in the manifestation, the god or the
Asura?”—that was the question put to the Mother. She answered as follows: “The
oldest tradition says that the first four emanations of the
Mahashakti—Consciousness, Love, Truth and Life—cut themselves off (separated
themselves) from their Supreme Origin and became Unconsciousness, Suffering,
Falsehood and Death. Then a second emanation was made to repair the damage.
They are the Gods.” [15]
Clearly, the emanations—love-hate, delight-pain,
truth-falsehood, life-death—we meet in Savitri
are the emanations of the Mahashakti and are not the direct powers and
personalities coming from the supreme Being whose first emanation is the
inconscient Void or the Nothingness. “All was plunged in the negating
Void”—that is the first movement and the emanations followed it. [16] The will
of the Supreme is carried out by the Mahashakti as her assigned work. Out of
his sleep of trance he called out his mute Force, the great Power, brahmaiva śakti, the Executrix of the
Worlds, the manifesting Word with the power of execution. It is her work that
we witness here.
“Let me withdraw myself into myself,”—that is the first
urge of the Absolute towards manifestation. Because he has withdrawn, there is
no activity, no sensation, no awareness. In it nothing happens, nothing can
happen. This Non-Existence or Asat is the reality of that absoluteness itself,
a kind of first Nothingness coming out of the last Nothingness. It has its
absolute omnipotence, a power resting in the full Void. If this has now to
become a basis for manifestation a second plunge is needed: the Absolute has to
send its creative Powers to base themselves in the Void. They came in full
freedom and in the joy of separation from the Source itself. But in the
process, the Absolute as the Void overpowered them and deformed them totally,
thus frustrating the first attempt. Yet by that very act something remarkable
happened to the Void and a possibility opened out for several transformative
descents. The four Asuric Beings are now standing as Guards at the Gate of the
utter Void, the Abyss of Inconscience. The occult-metaphysical aspect of it Sri
Aurobindo explains as follows: “The complete separation can take place only
when the stage of Inconscience has been reached and our world of manifold
Ignorance arises out of that tenebrous matrix.... Existence plunging into an
apparent Non-Existence, Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience, Delight of
existence into a vast cosmic insensibility are the first result of the fall
and, in the return from it by a struggling fragmentary experience, the
rendering of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood,
knowledge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of
Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleasure are the necessary
process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of Truth, Knowledge,
Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a contradiction of the
truth of things... Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence,
the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and
dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge.” [17]
Creation of the Void, plunge to form Inconscience,
first Incarnation, permanent Avatar, great Separation of the Four Powers from
the Origin because of the Joy and Freedom with which they moved out, setting up
of the cosmic ladder to realise the possibility of a divine manifestation, a possibility
which is there—these are some of the rapid steps in the sequence of this
evolutionary creation. About this mysterious Void we may speak in the language
of Nagarjuna as that which cannot be called void or not-void, or both, or
neither; it is only to indicate it that we speak of it as the Void—śunyam iti na vaktavyam aśunyam iti vā
bhavet, ubhayam nobhayam ceti; prajnāptyartham tu kathyaté.
What is occult has to become spiritual. “The world is
due to the will, samkalpa, of God,”
says the traditional knowledge. By his own Will the Divine has taken, via the
Void, the status of Inconscience. How does it happen? But that knowledge always
will remain a puzzle, a mystery. It could be the will to create; it could be
inherently an aspect of joy; it could be the self-existent; it could be a
movement of consciousness in its own awareness. It could be all these or else
something altogether different. In fact there was nothing like a beginning,
because there was no time present then. However, as far as the individual is
concerned, he advances in time. He offers his progress to the Master of the
Works. The spiritual path is the path of progress, of evolutionary advance
towards all-knowledge, towards the divine fulfilment in creation. That is what
really matters to us—with the occult providing the necessary basis for action
and growth.
Sri Aurobindo explains: “Only when we cross the border
into a larger luminous consciousness and self-aware substance where divine
Truth is a native and not a stranger, will there be revealed to us the Master
of our existence in the imperishable integral truth of his being and his powers
and his workings. Only there... will his works in us assume the flawless
movement of his unfailing supramental purpose. But that is the end of a long and
difficult journey, and the Master of works does not wait till then to meet the
seeker on the path of Yoga and put his secret or half-shown Hand upon him and
upon his inner life and actions. Already he was there in the world as the
Originator and Receiver of works behind the dense veils of the Inconscient,
disguised in force of Life, visible to the Mind through symbol godheads and
figures. It may well be in these disguises that he first meets the soul
destined to the way of the integral Yoga. Or even, wearing still vaguer masks,
he may be conceived by us as an Ideal or mentalised as an abstract Power of
Love, Good, Beauty or Knowledge; or, as we turn our feet towards the Way, he
may come to us veiled as the call of Humanity or a Will in things that drives towards
the deliverance of the world from the grasp of Darkness and Falsehood and Death
and Suffering—the great quaternary of Ignorance... For the supramental
Transcendence is not a thing absolutely apart and unconnected with our present
existence. It is a greater Light out of which all this has come for the
adventure of the Soul lapsing into the Inconscience and emerging out of it,
and, while that adventure proceeds, it waits superconscient above our minds
till it can become conscious in us. Hereafter it will unveil itself and by the
unveiling reveal to us all the significance of our own being and our works; for
it will disclose the Divine whose fuller manifestation in the world will
release and accomplish that covert significance.” [18] Such are the indisputable
yogic pragmatics and our earnest searching endeavour should be to live in them.
The occult of the Plunge has taken up the Spiritual,
providing descending and ascending grades of manifestation. It shall then
acquire a fuller significance in multifold manner of the terrestrial scheme,
the significance of Truth and Consciousness and Delight. Indeed, the
Inconscience itself being infinite—for it is the Absolute who has, to be sure,
become that—there is the infinity in this multifoldness emerging out of the
Inconscience. Such is a marvel worthy of the Divine himself, celebrating its
happy surprise. The Gods are later participators in this surprise of the utter
Inexpressible. But the reward is entirely the earth’s—or is it the Divine’s?
Perhaps it is so. Do we not chant that glory in the creative Word of Savitri which also establishes what it
chants?
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine. [19]
In this divine beatitude the Gods shall also
participate if they wish so, by taking birth on this earth. A new day has
dawned bringing with it the transformative wonder right here in the midst of
this creation, a day that sets not but grows forever in its splendour.
Thus we might say that the metaphysical foundations of
the evolutionary possibility are provided by the inconscient Self and the
somnambulist Force with the wonderful plunge of Love in the dim Abyss giving to
things a divine certitude. Yet that does not seem to assure the beginning of
evolution. There is needed the bright nucleus around which things can happen.
There has to be a progressive alchemic agent to carry out the chemistry of
transformation, of the base material into the noble, of lower nature into the
higher. The emergence of the divine individuals is the prerequisite for a
divine manifestation. It is here that the plunge of the soul into the negative
infinity becomes operative. It gives meaning to the entire process of
evolution, a sense of direction. Indeed, evolution is the climbing of the soul
to the higher and higher grades of consciousness, so that the Spirit’s powers
of love, beauty, joy, knowledge, harmony, will, force may express themselves
freely in the possibilities of the divine infinity. It is these which attracted
it into the adventure of the interminable bliss, present everywhere, even in
the unsouled almighty Inconscient. Thus was it drawn to hazard’s call and
danger’s charm:
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night.
It sensed a negative infinity,
A void supernal whose immense excess
Imitating God and everlasting Time
Offered a ground for Nature’s adverse birth
And Matter’s rigid hard unconsciousness
Harbouring the brilliance of a transient soul
That lights up birth and death and ignorant life…
A darkened Nature lived and held the seed
Of Spirit hidden and feigning not to be.
The eternal Consciousness became the home
Of some unsouled almighty Inconscient;
One breathed no more the spirit’s native air.
A stranger in the insentient universe,
Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour.
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance…
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain…
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
And battle on extinction’s perilous verge,
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world…
A vast disguise conceals the
Eternal’s bliss. [20]
This vast disguise is the pre-condition for evolution
to begin; cosmic dimensions of the inconscient Self and the somnambulist Force
acquire value when the transcendental Love enters into them; the free choice of
the soul to accept travail and ignominy of the mortal birth initiates the
process. Without the transcendental Love and the adventuring soul, the Self and
the Force will remain but only metaphysical concepts barren of spiritual or
even of physical contents. Without the foundational Void upholding the Self and
the Force, the transcendental Love will not find room to stay in nor will the
soul be charmed to take a plunge. Without the soul, there will be the
purposeless involution with the occult Void occupied by the ineffable
transcendental Love. While all the three terms are absolutely necessary for
evolutionary manifestation to occur, none of these individually or in pair is
sufficient; they have to be all together. But the active centre or agent of
operation always remains the evolving soul. It is a calm and steady and sure
flame in the darkness of the night, always burning in its Godward aspiration.
No bigger than the thumb of man, and unmindful of the “enigma of the
Inconscient’s world”, this heavenly Psyche must step out of the mystic cavern,
and stand uncovered in nature’s front, and rule her thoughts, and fill the body
and life. Then can the light of the spiritual sun be seen, the fount of
immortality reached. When it is marked as the basis of a wide-drawn scheme
there, amid the cosmic workings of the Gods, opens the possibility of moulding
humanity into God’s own shape, and leading this great blind struggling world to
light, or discovering, or creating a new world. Given such as the divine
compulsion
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth’s mortal state. [21]
To the evolutionary necessity there is therefore yet
another significant term: Earth or Bhumi. We must include it in the series
consisting of the omnipresent Being, omnipotent Consciousness-Force, the great
wonderful occult Void, the presence of the divine Love in the dark Abyss, the
evolving Soul; it is here on Earth that the entire effort is concentrated. It
is the only ground in the cosmic vastness that supports the Spirit’s urge to be
multiply divine. It is the only place in the entire creation where the divine
Flame burns in the form of the psychic being, always carrying with it the
Godward aspiration. The growth of the psychic being means the growth of the
Earth, thus proving it to be bhūmī in the real root sense, bhūmī
one who grows, expands, increases, of course spiritually, getting more and more
ready for higher manifestation. Sri Aurobindo writes: “…here where we dwell are
the worlds of Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in
consciousness from their source, of which this earth is a significant centre
and its evolution a crucial process.” [22] If organisation of conscious
experience is the aspect of evolution, then a focal point has to be formed in
order to gather around it the endeavour, to bring together all the gains on
which can be confirmed and shaped further prospects of the evolving future. In
the physical universe Earth is presently the chosen place. There are beings and
beings everywhere but it is the specificity of the psychic being that makes
Earth a “significant centre”. [23] This revelation of the occult-spiritual
knowledge is charged with meaningful and profound
connotations, and taking them away from it will mean a disastrous dogmatism; a
distinction must be made, for instance, between the spiritual and scientific
geo-centricity, even as their implications are of altogether different kinds.
But religious obscurantism and scientific obstinacy have to become things of
the past; they must get dissolved.
There is another difficulty also for the scientific
mind, of several descents in the context of evolution. This mind always takes a
linear view of the whole sequence, that it is entirely by the force inherent in
the material form that things happen, that the material contents are endowed
sufficiently well with the potentialities to bring about newer and newer
results; but that would mean a creation out of nothing, ex nihilo. Even
if it should grant—which the hard-core materialism does not—that life and mind
and higher faculties are already present in matter, are involved in it, it will
maintain that it is only the material force that will take care of everything;
matter is the originator of all that is, that it produces life and mind and it
will produce things of the future too. But the world is much vaster than what
the scientific data present to us; indeed, very little of it comes under their
purview. The emergence of newer and newer evolutionary features does not happen
in any automatic manner. Nor are the scientific theories infallible; their
assertions are always provisional. Indeed, falsifiability is taken as a good
criterion to judge the goodness of a theory. At best it provides an
understanding of a process but does not give knowledge of things. We may therefore
look more gainfully into the problem of evolution-connected descents from the
point of view of the occult-spiritual dimensions and realities.
While there is a natural push in nature to promote
evolution, at every crucial stage of the progress there have also been
purposeful descents. “All is contained in the inconscient or the subconscient,
but in potentiality; it is the action from above that helps to compel an
emergence.” [24] If the arrival of the Being of Life and later of the Being of
Mind, Pranamaya Purusha and Manomaya Purusha, on a cosmic scale had been
remarkable events in the history of evolution, there were also specific
descents in the form of exceptional individuals as Vibhutis of the Mahashakti,
the Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge, and the descents
of the Vibhutis of the Ishwara, their minds and bodies shaped by the Mahashakti
herself. Not only descents of such powers and personalities; there had also
been many incarnations of the Supreme himself, he coming age after age, yugé-yugé.
Not just for establishment of the dharma giving rise to proper order of
society; essentially his every coming has been to initiate a corresponding new
age of the Spirit in the possibilities of the Infinite. He comes to do divine
work, divyam karma, and give rise to divine birth, divyam janma.
There are, points out Sri Aurobindo, “two aspects of the divine birth; one is a
descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the
human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of
man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam
āgatah; it is the
being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which
Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve.” [25] Thus,
while all the work that is done here is preparatory, the coming of the Avatar
makes man’s rising into the divine nature and consciousness possible in a
decisive way. “Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and
body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes
no other will than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often
impotent before the inconscient and subconscient which obscure its clarity and
carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is
fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and
error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while
the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil.” [26]
But the Avatar comes in order to establish the higher
truth in man and in humanity. There is a Zen expression: “Practise as if your
hair were on fire.” That is of course necessary, but practice alone is not
sufficient. The needed sufficiency, and inevitability, is provided by the
divine power entering into the scheme of things.
The origin of material creation in the divine Nature or
Para Prakriti is unmistakable in revelations of the ancient scriptures. But,
finally, the question simply reduces as to how from the elements of this higher
Nature does the Immortal prepare his body in order to step into the mortal
world. By what process does the soul
come in a human body without which it cannot carry out its mission? The same
can be asked about the exceptional situation of the incarnating Avatar.
Material ingredients are without doubt indispensable, but there has to be
something more than just this obvious material stuff. While discussing the
process of Avatarhood as how are this human mind and body assumed, Sri
Aurobindo writes: “…they were not created suddenly and all of a piece, but by
some kind of evolution, physical or spiritual or both. No doubt, the descent of
the Avatar, like the divine birth from the other side, is essentially a
spiritual phenomenon, as is shown by the Gita’s ātmānam sŗjāmi, it is a
soul-birth; but still there is here an attendant physical birth.” [27] The soul
prepares its own body, the body is not prepared for it without any reference to
the soul. But more likely is that “the body is prepared by the Jiva but assumed
from birth by the Godhead or that it is prepared by one of the four Manus, catvāro
manavaħ, of the Gita, the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body.”
[28]
While the Avatar looses forth himself forcefully into
this creation by the power of his own Yogamaya, while his is the birth of a
self-conscious and self-existent being, he accepts the human condition to deal
with it in a divine way. He comes here and accepts the evolutionary travail; he
undertakes the difficult and painful work, that thus alone the divine birth
might become possible. Hard is the incarnate being’s task; he receives the
cross in payment of the divine gifts he comes here to offer. This world itself
becomes his antagonist. Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes, yet till
the evil is slain in its own home and Light invades the world’s inconscient
base and the adversary Force has perished, he must labour on. [29] The Danish
sculptor Thorvaldsen became immortal when he created Christ’s Come unto Me.
The sculptor was looking again and again at the statue and something happened
to him. He found Christ looking down upon man with all love and compassion. But
the Son of God was ridiculed and rejected by man and he was told: “Come unto
Me.” Yet this creation cannot fail—because it is the creation of the supreme
Consciousness-Force herself. There are the aspiring voices and there is the
answering Power ready to come and help, the Power of Transformation working
despite the difficulties of the path.
The Titan entreaties in Sri Aurobindo’s Ahana are
poignant even as they tell how they, who were once in the mystic and vast
world, who dwelt in delight, those who could help, the Ancients of Knowledge,
the Sons of the Morning, were condemned to languish in Hell. They ask Ahana,
the Dawn of the Future, if she had not hidden herself in the mask of a million
faces:
In the beginning of things when nought was abroad but
the waters,
Ocean stirred with longing his mighty and deep-bosomed
daughters.
Out of that longing gigantic we rose from the voiceless
recesses;
Candid, unwarmed, O Ahana, the wide ethereal abysses
Stretched enormous, silent, void of the breath of thy
greatness;
We alone peopled, and troubled with rapture their
ancient sedateness:
We are the gods who have mapped out Time and measured
its spaces;
Raised there our mansions of pride and planned its
amorous places…
Thou art our mother and sister and bride. O girdled
with splendour,
Cruel and bright as the sun, O moonlike, mystic and
tender!
Thou art the perfect peopling of Space, O Ahana; thou
only
Fillest Time with thy forms. Leave then thy eternity
lonely,
Come! from thy summits descending arrive to us,
Daughter of Heaven,
Usha, Dawn of the world, for our ways to thy footsteps
are given.[30]
Ahana’s boon is: “Vast, I descend from God. O world and
its masters, receive me.”
References
[1] Savitri, pp.
5, 291, 315-16, 623-24
[2] Ibid., pp. 294-95
[3] Collected Poems, pp. 591-92
[4] M. Alan Kazlev, Internet write-up uploaded 16 July
2004
[5] The Life Divine, p. 478
[6] Savitri, p. 621
[7] The Life Divine, pp. 253-57
[8] Savitri, pp. 60-66
[9] The Secret of the Veda, p. 98
[10] The Life Divine, pp. 80-89
[11] Questions
and Answers, CWM, Vol. 9, pp. 205-06
[12] Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 339
[13] Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 241
[14] Savitri,
pp. 140-41
[15] Some Answers
from the Mother, CWM, Vol. 16, p. 370
[16] Savitri,
p. 140
[17] The Life
Divine, pp. 287-88
[18] The
Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 248-50
[19] Savitri,
pp. 710-11
[20] Ibid., pp. 454-56
[21] Ibid., p. 486
[22] The Mother
[23] Ibid.
[24] The Life Divine, p. 801
[25] Essays on the Gita, p. 148
[26] The Life Divine, pp. 899-900
[27] Essays on the Gita, pp. 165-66
[28] Ibid., p. 157
[29] Savitri, p. 448
[30] Collected Poems, pp. 540-44