Jnana

(Knowledge)

Fourth Period of Commentaries

(1969 – 1970) 

125 – Every law, however embracing or tyrannous, meets somewhere a contrary law by which its operation can be checked, modified, annulled or eluded.

 

126 – The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit.

 

There is no law of Nature that cannot be overcome and changed, if we have the faith that all is ruled by the Lord and that it is possible for us to come into direct contact with Him, if we know how to escape from the prison-house of age-old habits and give ourselves unreservedly to His will.

In truth, nothing is fixed, everything is in perpetual change; and this ascending transformation will lead this inconscient and mortal creation back step by step to the eternal and all-powerful consciousness of the Lord.  

3 August 1969 

127 – Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.

 

The laws of Nature are imperative for the physical nature only so long as this nature is not under the influence of the psychic being (the soul); for the psychic being is in possession of the divine power which can, for its own ends, use all processes and formulas and transform them at will.  

5 August 1969

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128 – Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.

 

129 – O son of Immortality, live not thou according to Nature, but according to God; and compel her also to live according to the deity within thee.

 

What does Sri Aurobindo mean here by the nature which exceeds the body?

 

The nature which exceeds the body is the nature which goes on living even after the disappearance of the body; it is the psychic nature which is immortal and divine in essence. The psychic can and must become conscious of the Divine at its centre and consciously unite with Him.  

7 August 1969

 

130 – Fate is God's foreknowledge outside Space and Time of all that in Space and Time shall yet happen; what He has foreseen, Power and Necessity work out by the conflict of forces.

 

If everything is foreseen, what is the role of human aspiration and effort?

 

In each domain (physical, vital and mental) everything is foreseen; but the intrusion of a higher domain (overmental and beyond) introduces another determinism into events and can change the course of things. This is what aspiration can achieve.

As for human effort, it is one of the things that are determined and its role is foreseen in the overall play of forces.  

 9 August 1969

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131 –Because God has willed and foreseen everything, thou shouldst not therefore sit inactive and wait upon His providence, for thy action is one of His chief effective forces. Up then and be doing, not with egoism, but as the circumstance, instrument and apparent cause of the event that He has predetermined.

 

132 – When I knew nothing, then I abhorred the criminal, sinful and impure, being myself full of crime, sin and impurity; but when I was cleansed and my eyes unsealed, then I bowed down in my spirit before the thief and the murderer and adored the feet of the harlot; for I saw that these souls had accepted the terrible burden of evil and drained for all of us the greater portion of the churned poison of the world-ocean.

 

For one who has fully realised that the world is nothing but the One Supreme in His manifestation, all human moral notions necessarily disappear to give way to a vision of the whole in which all values are changed – oh, how greatly changed! 

 14 August 1969

 

133 – The Titans are stronger than the gods because they have agreed with God to front and bear the burden of His wrath and enmity; the gods were able to accept only the pleasant burden of His love and kindlier rapture.

 

To understand rightly what Sri Aurobindo truly means, one must know the wonderful sense of humour in his way of thinking.  

 16 August 1969  

So the gods are cowards! Then where is their greatness

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and splendour? Why do we worship inferior beings? And the Titans must be the most lovable sons of the Divine?

 

What Sri Aurobindo writes here is a paradox to awaken sluggish minds. But one must understand all the irony these phrases contain and above all the intention he puts behind the words. Besides, cowardly or not, I see no need for us to worship the gods, great or small. Our worship must go to the Supreme Lord alone, one in all things and beings.  

            6 November 1961

 

134 – When thou art able to see how necessary is suffering to final delight, failure to utter effectiveness and retardation to the last rapidity, then thou mayst begin to understand something, however faintly and dimly, of God's workings.

 

135 – All disease is a means towards some new joy of health, all evil and pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss and good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is God's secret which only the soul purified of egoism can penetrate.

 

136 – Why is thy mind or thy body in pain? Because thy soul behind the veil wishes for the pain or takes delight in it; but if thou wilt – and perseverest in thy will – thou canst impose the spirit's law of unmixed delight on thy lower members.

 

One has only to attempt the experience and to persevere in one's effort, then one will find that what is stated here is perfectly true.  

 19 August 1969 

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137 – There is no iron or ineffugable law that a given contact shall create pain or pleasure; it is the way the soul meets the rush or pressure of Brahman upon the members from outside them that determines either reaction.

 

It is obvious that the same event or the same contact causes pleasure in one and pain in another, depending on the inner attitude taken by each one.

And this observation leads towards a great realisation; for once one has not only understood but also felt that the Supreme Lord is the originator of all things and one remains constantly in contact with Him, all becomes the action of His Grace and is changed into calm and luminous bliss.  

21 August 1969

 

138 – The force of soul in thee meeting the same force from outside cannot harmonise the measures of the contact in values of mind-experience and body-experience; therefore thou hast pain, grief or uneasiness. If thou canst learn to adjust the replies of the force in thyself to the questions of world-force, thou shalt find pain becoming pleasurable or turning into pure delightfulness. Right relation is the condition of blissfulness, Ritam¹ the key of Ananda.²

 

Human beings are in the habit of basing their relationships with others on physical, vital and mental contacts; that is why there is almost always discord and suffering. If, on the contrary, they based their relationships on psychic contacts (between soul and soul), they would find that behind the troubled appearances there is a profound and lasting harmony which can express itself

 

¹ Right; Truth of knowledge and action.

² Delight of existence.

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in all the activities of life and cause disorder and suffering to be replaced by peace and bliss.  

            28 August 1969

 

139 – Who is the superman? He who can rise above this matter-regarding broken mental human unit and possess himself universalised and deified in a divine force, a divine love and joy and a divine knowledge.

 

The superman is now in the making and a new consciousness has very recently manifested on earth to bring this process to perfection.

But it is unlikely that any human being has yet arrived at this fulfilment, especially since it must be accompanied by a transformation of the physical body, and this has not yet been accomplished.  

30 August 1969

 

140 – If thou keepest this limited human ego and thinkest thyself the superman, thou art but the fool of thy own pride, the plaything of thy own force and the instrument of thy own illusions.

 

This naturally implies that all the ambitious people who now declare themselves to be supermen can only be impostors or people full of pride who deceive themselves and try to deceive others.  

30 August 1969

 

141 – Nietzsche saw the superman as the lion-soul passing out of camel-hood, but the true heraldic device and token of the superman is the lion seated upon 

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the camel which stands upon the cow of plenty. If thou canst not be the slave of all mankind, thou art not fit to be its master and if thou canst not make thy nature as Vasishtha's cow of plenty with all mankind to draw its wish from her udders, what avails thy leonine superman-hood?

 

To be the slave of all mankind means to be ready to serve mankind; and to make oneself as the cow of plenty means to be able to pour forth abundantly all the force, the light, the power that mankind needs in order to emerge from its ignorance and incapacity; for if this were not so, a superhuman being would be a burden rather than a help to earth.  

 31 August 1969

 

142 – Be to the world as the lion in fearlessness and lordship, as the camel in patience and service, as the cow in quiet, forbearing and maternal beneficence. Raven in all the joys of God as a lion over its prey, but bring also all humanity into that infinite field of luxurious ecstasy to wallow there and to pasture.

 

These are the qualities needed for the growth of the being until its divinisation; it is also a reminder that no transformation can be complete without the ascent of humanity.  

1 September 1969

 

143 – If Art's service is but to imitate Nature, then burn all the picture galleries and let us have instead photographic studios. It is because Art reveals what Nature hides that a small picture is worth more than all the jewels of the millionaires and the treasures of the princes.  

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144 – If you only imitate visible Nature, you will perpetrate either a corpse, a dead sketch or a monstrosity; Truth lives in that which goes behind and beyond the visible and sensible.

 

Photograph y is said to be a medium of modern art. What is your opinion about this?

 

It all depends on the way in which photograph y is used. Its natural purpose and common use is documentary; the more exact and precise it is, the more useful it is.

But undeniably, there are artists who use photograph y as a medium of expression. But then what they do is no longer an exact copy of Nature, it is an arrangement of forms and colours intended to express something else which is usually hidden by physical appearances.  

4 September 1969

 

145 – O Poet, O Artist, if thou but holdest up the mirror to Nature, thinkest thou Nature will rejoice in thy work? Rather she will turn away her face. For what dost thou hold up to her there? Herself? No, but a lifeless outline and reflection, a shadowy mimicry. It is the secret soul of Nature thou hast to seize, thou hast to hunt eternally after the truth in the external symbol, and that no mirror will hold for thee, nor for her whom thou seekest.

 

What is this “eternal symbol”¹ which Sri Aurobindo speaks of here?

 

The eternal symbol is the secret soul of Nature and it is the

 

¹ The translation used was based on a text which read eternal symbol instead of “external symbol”. 

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Truth of this soul that the poet and the artist must seek and express.  

 7 September 1969

 

146 – I find in Shakespeare a far greater and more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creatures are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo and his dog up to Lear and Hamlet.

 

147 – The Greeks sought universality by omitting all finer individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta — guna in man to the eye of humanity.

 

148 – Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph  or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula.

 

149 – Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her.

 

150 – There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God's touch and been drawn to it and the sceptical seeker and self-convinced atheist; but for the formularists of all the religions and the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living.  

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Don't the formularists of the religions help the ordinary masses by giving them an image of God? Don't you think that religion helps ordinary people?

 

Everything that happens, happens by the will of the Supreme Lord in order to lead the whole creation to the knowledge of the Supreme.

But by far the greatest part of this action works by contrast and negation. This is how religions work for most so-called believers, who follow their religion with no faith and even less experience.  

14 September 1969

 

151 – A man came to a scientist and wished to be instructed; his instructor showed him the revelations of the microscope and telescope, but the man laughed and said, “These are obviously hallucinations inflicted on the eye by the glass which you use as a medium; I will not believe till you show these wonders to my naked seeing.” Then the scientist proved to him by many collateral facts and experiments the reliability of his knowledge but the man laughed again and said, What you term proofs, I term coincidences, the number of coincidences does not constitute proof; as for your experiments, they are obviously effected under abnormal conditions and constitute a sort of insanity of Nature. When confronted with the results of mathematics, he was angry and cried out, This is obviously imposture, gibberish and superstition; will you try to make me believe that these absurd cabalistic figures have any real force and meaning? Then the scientist drove him out as a hopeless imbecile; for he did not recognise his own system of denials and his own method of negative reasoning. If we wish to refuse an impartial and open-minded enquiry, 

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we can always find the most respectable polysyllables to cover our refusal or impose tests and conditions which stultify the inquiry.

 

Scientists, who are mostly materialists, use the same procedures to refute occult and spiritual knowledge as ignorant imbeciles use to refute science.

What is clear proof to a man of goodwill is imposture to one who refuses to learn.

17 September 1969

 

152 – When our minds are involved in matter, they think matter the only reality; when we draw back into immaterial consciousness, then we see matter a mask and feel existence in consciousness alone as having the touch of reality. Which then of these two is the truth? Nay, God knoweth; but he who has had both experiences, can easily tell which condition is the more fertile in knowledge, the mightier and more blissful.

 

153 – I believe immaterial consciousness to be truer than material consciousness, because I know in the first what in the second is hidden from me and also can command what the mind knows in matter.

 

How can one always remain in an immaterial consciousness?

 

One cannot and it would not be good.

Sri Aurobindo does not mention here the consciousness that is higher than either of the two consciousnesses in question (material and immaterial), that is, the supramental consciousness which contains all the other consciousnesses in itself and can thus know everything on all planes of being. This is the consciousness we should aspire for, this is the consciousness which can teach us the total Truth.  

 18 September 1969 

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