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61 – There is nothing finite. It is only the Infinite who can create for Himself limits. The finite can have no beginning nor end, for the very act of conceiving its beginning and end declares its infinity.
How can we have the experience of the Infinite?
The only way is to come out of the consciousness of the finite. It is in the hope of achieving this that all yogic disciplines have been developed and undertaken from time immemorial until now. Much has been written on the subject, but little has been done. Only a very small number of individuals have so far succeeded in escaping from the finite to plunge into the Infinite. And yet, as Sri Aurobindo has written, the Infinite alone exists; only the falsehood of our superficial perception makes us believe in the existence of the finite.
20 May 1961
62 – I heard a fool discoursing utter folly and wondered what God meant by it; then I considered and saw a distorted mask of truth and wisdom.
How can folly be a distorted mask of truth?
It is the very definition of folly that Sri Aurobindo gives here. A mask is something that conceals, that makes invisible what it covers. And if the mask is distorted, it not only renders invisible what it conceals but also totally changes its nature. So, according to this definition, folly is something that veils and distorts beyond all recognition the Truth which is at the origin of all things. 23 June 1961 Page - 98 Does Sri Aurobindo mean that there is no absolute falsehood, no absolute untruth?
There can be no absolute untruth. In actual fact it is not possible, because the Divine is behind all things. It is like people who ask whether certain elements will disappear from the universe. What could the destruction of a universe mean? If we come out of our folly, what can we call destruction? Only the form, the appearance is destroyed – and indeed, all appearances are destroyed, one after another. It is also said – it is written everywhere, so many things are said – that the adverse forces will either be converted, that is to say, they will become conscious of the Divinity within them and become divine, or they will be destroyed. But what does destroyed mean? Their form? Their form of consciousness can be dissolved, but that something which makes them exist, which makes all things exist – how could that be destroyed? The universe is an objectivisation, an objective self-discovery of That which is from all eternity. So? How can the All cease to be? The infinite and eternal All, that is to say, That which has no limits of any kind – what can go outside That? There is no place to go! Go where? There is nothing but That. Furthermore, when we say There is only That, we are locating it somewhere, which is absolutely stupid. So, what can be taken away from there? One can conceive of a universe being projected outside the present manifestation. One can conceive of universes having succeeded each other and that which was in the earlier ones would no longer be in the later ones – that is even obvious. One can conceive that a whole mass of falsehood and untruth – things which are falsehood and untruth for us now – will no longer belong to the world as it will be in its unfolding; all this one can understand – but “destroy”? Where can it go to be destroyed? When we speak of destroying, we think only of Page - 99 the destruction of a form – it may be a form of consciousness or a material form, but it is always a form. But how could what is without form be destroyed? So to speak of an absolute falsehood that will disappear would simply mean that a whole set of things will live eternally in the past but will not belong to future manifestations, that is all. One cannot go outside That!
But they will remain in the past?
We are told that there is a state of consciousness, when we rise above, when we are able to go beyond both the aspect of Nothingness or Nirvana and the aspect of Existence – there is the Nirvana aspect and the Existence aspect, the two simultaneous and complementary aspects of the Supreme – where all things exist eternally and simultaneously; so one can conceive God knows! This may well be another stupidity – one can conceive of a certain number of things passing into Non-Being, and that to our consciousness would be a disappearance or a destruction. Is that possible? I do not know. You would have to ask the Lord, but usually He does not answer such questions. He smiles! There comes a time when really one can no longer say anything: one has the feeling that whatever one says, even if it isn't absolutely inane, is not far short of it, and that it would actually be better to keep quiet. That is the difficulty. In some of these Aphorisms you feel that he has suddenly caught hold of something above and beyond everything that can be thought – so what can one say? (Silence) Naturally, when one comes down here again, one can – Page - 100 oh, one can say many things! As a joke – one can always joke, but one hesitates to do so because people take your jokes so seriously – one could very well say, without being completely wrong, that one sometimes learns much more by listening to a madman or a fool than by listening to a reasonable man. I am quite sure of it. There is nothing that withers you more than reasonable people. 27 June 1961 63 – God is great, says the Mahomedan. Yes, He is so great that He can afford to be weak, whenever that too is necessary.
64 – God often fails in His workings; it is the sign of His illimitable godhead.
65 – Because God is invincibly great, He can afford to be weak; because He is immutably pure, He can indulge with impunity in sin; He knows eternally all delight, therefore He tastes also the delight of pain; He is inalienably wise, therefore He has not debarred Himself from folly.
Why does God need to be weak?
Sri Aurobindo does not say that God has any need of weakness. He says that in any particular whole, for the perfection of the play of forces, a moment of weakness may be just as necessary as a display of strength. And he adds, somewhat ironically, that since God is almighty force, He can at the same time afford to be weak, if necessary. This is to widen the outlook of certain moralists who attribute definite qualities to God and will not permit Him to be otherwise. Page - 101 Strength as we see it and weakness as we see it are both an equally distorted expression of the Divine Truth which is secretly present behind all physical manifestations. 30 June 1961 Does God ever really fail? Is God ever really weak? Or is it simply a game?¹
It is not like that! That is precisely the distortion in the Western attitude as opposed to the attitude of the Gita. It is extremely difficult for the Western mind to understand in a living and concrete manner that everything is the Divine. People are so deeply imbued with the Christian idea of “God the Creator” – the creation on one side and God on the other. When you think about it you reject it, but it has penetrated into the sensations and feelings; so, spontaneously, instinctively, almost subconsciously, you attribute to God everything you consider to be best and most beautiful and, above all, everything you want to attain, to realise. Naturally, each one changes the content of his God according to his own consciousness, but it is always what he considers to be best. And that is also why instinctively and spontaneously, subconsciously, you are shocked by the idea that God can be things that you do not like, that you do not approve of or do not think best. I put that rather childishly, on purpose, so that you can understand it properly. But it is like that – I am sure, because I observed it in myself for a very long time, because of the subconscious formation of childhood, environment, education, etc. You must be able to press into this body the consciousness of Oneness, the absolute exclusive Oneness of the Divine – exclusive in the sense that nothing exists except in this Oneness, even the things we find most repulsive. And this is what Sri Aurobindo is fighting, for he too had
¹ The Mother replied orally to this question. Page - 102 this Christian education, he too had to struggle; and these Aphorisms are the result – the flowering, as it were – of this necessity of fighting a subconscious formation. For that is what makes you ask such questions: “How can God be weak? How can God be foolish? How…?” But there is nothing other than God, only He exists, there is nothing outside Him. And if something seems ugly to us, it is simply because He no longer wants it to exist. He is preparing the world so that this thing may no longer be manifested, so that the manifestation can move from that state to something else. So naturally, within us, we violently repulse everything that is about to go out of the active manifestation – there is a movement of rejection. But it is Him. There is nothing but Him. This is what we should repeat to ourselves from morning to evening and from evening to morning, because we forget it at each moment. There is only Him. There is nothing but Him – He alone exists, there is no existence without Him, there is only Him! So, to ask a question like this is still to react like those who make a distinction between what is and what is not Divine or rather between what is and what is not God. “How can He be weak?” It is a question I cannot ask.
I understand, but they speak of the Lila, the divine play; so He is standing back, as it were. He is not really entirely involved, not really absolutely in the play.
Yes, yes, He is! He is totally in it. He himself is the Play. We speak of God, but we should remember that there are all these gradations of consciousness; and when we speak of God and His Play, we mean God in His transcendent state, beyond all the levels of matter, and when we speak of the Play we speak of God in his material state. So we say: Transcendent God is watching and playing – in Himself, by Himself, with Himself – His material game. But all language is a language of ignorance. Our entire way Page - 103 of expressing ourselves, everything we say and the way in which we say it, is necessarily ignorance. And that is why it is so difficult to express something which is concretely true; this would require explanations which would themselves be full of falsehood, of course, or else extremely long. This is why Sri Aurobindo's sentences are sometimes very long, precisely because he strives to escape from this ignorant language. Our very way of thinking is wrong. The believers, the faithful, all of them – particularly in the West – when they speak of God, think of Him as “something else,” they think that He cannot be weak, ugly or imperfect – they think wrongly, they divide, they separate. It is subconscious, unreflecting thought; they are in the habit of thinking like this instinctively; they do not watch themselves thinking. For example, when they speak of perfection in a general way, they see or feel or postulate precisely the sum-total of everything they consider to be virtuous, divine, beautiful, admirable – but it is not that at all! Perfection is something which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine in His entirety, which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine as a whole, from whom nothing has been taken away – so it is just the opposite! For the moralists divine perfection means all the virtues that they represent. From the true point of view, perfection is the whole (Mother makes a global gesture), and it is precisely the fact that there can be nothing outside the whole. It is impossible that anything should be missing, because it is impossible for anything not to form part of the whole. There can be nothing which is not in the whole. Let me explain. A given universe may not contain everything, for a universe is a mode of manifestation; but there is every possible kind of universe. So I always come back to the same thing: there can be nothing which does not form part of the whole. Therefore one can say that each thing is in its place, exactly as it should be, and that relations between things are exactly as they should be. Page - 104 But perfection is only one special way of approaching the Divine; it is one side, and in the same way there are innumerable sides, angles or aspects, innumerable ways of approaching the Divine, for example: will, truth, purity, perfection, unity, immortality, eternity, infinity, silence, peace, existence, consciousness, etc. The number of approaches is almost unlimited. With each one you approach or draw near or enter into contact with the Divine through one aspect and if you really do it, you find that the difference is merely in the most external form, but the contact is identical. It is as if you were turning around a centre, a globe, and seeing it from many different angles as in a kaleidoscope; but once the contact is made, it is the same thing. Perfection is therefore a global way of approaching the Divine: everything is there and everything is as it should be – “should be”, that is to say, a perfect expression of the Divine; one cannot even say of His Will, for if you say His Will it is still something outside Him. One can also say – but this is far, far below it – that He is what He is and exactly as He wants to be – with this “exactly as He wants to be”, one has come down by a considerable number of steps! But this is to give you the point of view of perfection. Besides, divine perfection implies infinity and eternity; that is to say, everything coexists outside time and space. It is like the word purity; one could hold forth interminably on the difference between divine purity and what people call purity. The divine purity, at the lowest, allows no influence other than the divine influence – at the lowest. But that is already very much distorted; the divine purity means that there is only the Divine, nothing else – it is perfectly pure, there is only the Divine, there is nothing other than Him. And so on. 7 July 1961 Page - 105 66 – Sin is that which was once in its place, persisting now it is out of place; there is no other sinfulness.
Has cruelty, for example, ever been in its place? ¹
This very question of yours came to my vision, since I receive in my consciousness all the questions people ask. To kill out of cruelty? To make others suffer out of cruelty? And yet it is an expression of the Divine – we always come back to the same thing – but an expression which is distorted in its appearance. Can you tell me what lies behind it? Cruelty was one of the things that was most repugnant to Sri Aurobindo, but he always said that it was the distortion of an intensity, one could almost say the distortion of an intensity of love, something which is not satisfied with a middle course, which wants extremes – and that is justifiable. I had always known that cruelty, like sadism, is a need for violent, extremely strong sensation, to penetrate a thick layer of tamas that feels nothing – tamas needs something extreme in order to be able to feel. The explanation may lie in this direction. But at the origin there is still the problem that has never been solved: Why has it become like this? Why this distortion? Why has it all been perverted? Behind, there are beautiful things, very intense, infinitely more powerful than what we can even bear, wonderful things, but why has all that become so frightful here? This is what came to me immediately when I read this Aphorism. The concept of sin is something that I do not understand and have never understood; original sin seems to me one of the most monstrous ideas that man could ever have – sin and I don't go together! So naturally, I fully agree with Sri Aurobindo that there is no sin, this is understood, but… Certain things, like cruelty, could be called sin, but I can only see this explanation, that it is a distortion of the taste or
¹ Oral Question and answer. Page - 106 need for an extremely strong sensation. I have observed in cruel people that they feel Ananda at that moment; they find an intense joy in it. So that is its justification, only it is in such a state of distortion that it is repugnant. As for the idea that things are not in their place, I understood it even when I was a child. It was only later that I was given the explanation by the person who taught me occultism, for, in his cosmogonic system, he explained the successive pralayas¹ of the various universes by saying that with each universe an aspect of the Supreme would manifest itself, that each universe was built on one aspect of the Supreme and that one after another they had all returned into the Supreme. He enumerated all the aspects that were manifested successively and with what logic! It was extraordinary – I have kept it somewhere, I forget where. And he said that this time, it was – I do not remember exactly what number in the series – but it would be the universe which would not be withdrawn again, which would follow a progressive course of becoming that would be, so to say, indefinite. And this universe represented equilibrium, not static but progressive equilibrium that is to say, each thing in its place, exactly, each vibration, each movement in its place. The further down one goes, the more each form, each activity, each thing is exactly in its place in relation to the whole. I was extremely interested, because later Sri Aurobindo said the same thing, that nothing is bad, it is just that things are not in their place – their place not only in space but also in time; their place in the universe, beginning with the worlds, the stars, etc. – each thing exactly in its place. And so, when each thing is exactly in its place, from the most stupendous to the most microscopic, the whole will express the Supreme progressively, without any need of being withdrawn to be emanated again. On this Sri Aurobindo based the fact that in this creation, in this universe, the perfection of a divine world – what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind – will be able to manifest. Equilibrium is
¹ Pralaya: the end or destruction of a universe. Page - 107 the essential law of this creation and this is why perfection can be realised in the manifestation.
In this connection what are the very first things that the Supramental Force intends to drive out, or is trying to drive out, so that everything may be in its place, individually and cosmically?
Drive out? But will it “drive out” anything? If we accept Sri Aurobindo's idea, it will put each thing in its place, that's all. One thing must necessarily cease, and that is the distortion, that is to say, the veil of falsehood upon Truth, because that is what is responsible for everything we see here. If this is removed, things will be completely different, completely. They will be what we feel them to be when we come out of this consciousness. When one comes out of this consciousness and enters into the Truth-consciousness; the difference is such that one wonders how there can be anything like suffering and misery and death and all that. There is a kind of astonishment in the sense that one does not understand how it can happen – when one has really tipped over to the other side. But this experience is usually associated with the experience of the unreality of the world as we know it, whereas Sri Aurobindo says that this perception of the unreality of the world is not necessary to live in the supramental consciousness – it is only the unreality of Falsehood, not the unreality of the world. That is to say, the world has a reality of its own, independent of Falsehood. I suppose that is the first effect of the Supermind – the first effect in the individual, because it will begin with the individual. 18 July 1961 67 – There is no sin in man, but a great deal of disease, ignorance and misapplication. Page - 108 68 – The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was God's corrective for egoism. But man's egoism meets God's device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.
At what phase of his development will man be able to rid himself of egoism?
When egoism will no longer be necessary to make man a conscious individuality. 27 July 1961 Page - 109 |