{"id":2189,"date":"2013-07-13T01:40:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2189"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:40:01","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:01","slug":"47-chapter-i-love-and-the-triple-path-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga\/47-chapter-i-love-and-the-triple-path-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-47_Chapter I Love and the Triple Path.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, c. 1915-1918<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPart III <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Yoga of Divine Love <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tChapter I
\n\t\t\t<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLove and the Triple Path
\n\t\t\t<\/a>
\n\t\t\t<\/font><\/b> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tW<\/font>ILL, KNOWLEDGE<\/b> and love are the three divine
\npowers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human
\nsoul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen,
\nbe the foundation of an integral Yoga. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAction is the first power of life. Nature begins with force
\nand its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action God-wards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine. It is the door of first access, the starting-point of the
\ninitiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and
\nis directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly accomplished. But works fulfil themselves in knowledge; all the
\ntotality of works, says the Gita, finds its rounded culmination in knowledge, sarvam karmā<\/font>khilam jnā<\/font>ne parisamā<\/font>pyate<\/i>. By
\nunion in will and works we become one in the omnipresent conscious being from whom all our will and works have their
\nrise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is
\nthe delight of conscious union with the Being in whom we live, act and move, by whom we exist, for whom alone we learn in
\nthe end to act and to be. That is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from
\nworks as our way of access and our line of contact. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tKnowledge is the foundation of a constant living in the
\nDivine. For consciousness is the foundation of all living and being, and knowledge is the action of the consciousness, the
\nlight by which it knows itself and its realities, the power by which, starting from action, we are able to hold the inner results<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>545<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tof thought and act in a firm growth of our conscious being
\nuntil it accomplishes itself, by union, in the infinity of the divine being. The Divine meets us in many aspects and to each of
\nthem knowledge is the key, so that by knowledge we enter into and possess the infinite and divine in every way of his being,
\nsarvabhā<\/font>vena<\/i>,\u00b9<\/font> and receive him into us and are possessed by 
\nhim in every way of ours. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWithout knowledge we live blindly in him with the blindness
\nof the power of Nature intent on its works, but forgetful of its source and possessor, undivinely therefore, deprived of the real,
\nthe full delight of our being. By knowledge arriving at conscious oneness with that which we know,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for by identity alone can
\ncomplete and real knowledge exist, \u2014 the division is healed and the cause of all our limitation and discord and weakness and
\ndiscontent is abolished. But knowledge is not complete without works; for the Will in being also is God and not the being
\nor its self-aware silent existence alone, and if works find their culmination in knowledge, knowledge also finds its fulfilment
\nin works. And, here too, love is the crown of knowledge; for love is the delight of union, and unity must be conscious of
\njoy of union to find all the riches of its own delight. Perfect knowledge indeed leads to perfect love, integral knowledge to
\na rounded and multitudinous richness of love. “He who knows me” says the Gita “as the supreme Purusha,”
\n\t\t\t\u2014 not only as the
\nimmutable oneness, but in the many-souled movement of the divine and as that, superior to both, in which both are divinely
\nheld, \u2014 “he, because he has the integral knowledge, seeks me by love in every way of his being.” This is the trinity of our powers,
\nthe union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from knowledge. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLove is the crown of all being and its way of fulfilment, that by which it rises to all intensity and all fullness and the ecstasy of
\nutter self-finding. For if the Being is in its very nature consciousness and by consciousness we become one with it, therefore by
\nperfect knowledge of it fulfilled in identity, yet is delight the <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t \u00b9<\/font> Gita<\/font>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>546<\/font>  
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tnature of consciousness and of the acme of delight love is the
\nkey and the secret. And if will is the power of conscious being by which it fulfils itself and by union in will we become one with
\nthe Being in its characteristic infinite power, yet all the works of that power start from delight, live in the delight, have delight
\nfor their aim and end; love of the Being in itself and in all of itself that its power of consciousness manifests, is the way to the
\nperfect wideness of the Ananda. Love is the power and passion of the divine self-delight and without love we may get the rapt
\npeace of its infinity, the absorbed silence of the Ananda, but not its absolute depth of richness and fullness. Love leads us
\nfrom the suffering of division into the bliss of perfect union, but without losing that joy of the act of union which is the soul’s
\ngreatest discovery and for which the life of the cosmos is a long preparation. Therefore to approach God by love is to prepare
\noneself for the greatest possible spiritual fulfilment. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLove fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings
\nknowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. “By Bhakti” says the Lord in the Gita “shall
\na man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the
\nprinciples of my being, then he enters into Me.” Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often
\ndangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often
\nby its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love
\nis not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his
\nbeing, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one’s love for God. This is
\nthe trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion
\nwith Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover’s being the fulfilment of ours,
\nits secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>547<\/font>
\n  
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tSince then in the union of these three powers lies our base
\nof perfection, the seeker of an integral self-fulfilment in the Divine must avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the
\nmisunderstanding and mutual depreciation which we often find existent between the followers of the three paths. Those who
\nhave the cult of knowledge seem often, if not to despise, yet to look downward from their dizzy eminence on the path of
\nthe devotee as if it were a thing inferior, ignorant, good only for souls that are not yet ready for the heights of the Truth. It
\nis true that devotion without knowledge is often a thing raw, crude, blind and dangerous, as the errors, crimes, follies of the
\nreligious have too often shown. But this is because devotion in them has not found its own path, its own real principle,
\nhas not therefore really entered on the path, but is fumbling and feeling after it, is on one of the bypaths that lead to it;
\nand knowledge too at this stage is as imperfect as devotion, dogmatic, schismatic, intolerant, bound up in the narrowness
\nof some single and exclusive principle, even that being usually very imperfectly seized. When the devotee has grasped the power
\nthat shall raise him, has really laid hold on love, that in the end purifies and enlarges him as effectively as knowledge can; they
\nare equal powers, though their methods of arriving at the same goal are different. The pride of the philosopher looking down
\non the passion of the devotee arises, as does all pride, from a certain deficiency of his nature; for the intellect too exclusively
\ndeveloped misses what the heart has to offer. The intellect is not in every way superior to the heart; if it opens more readily
\ndoors at which the heart is apt to fumble in vain, it is, itself, apt to miss truths which to the heart are very near and easy
\nto hold. And if when the way of thought deepens into spiritual experience, it arrives readily at the etherial heights, pinnacles,
\nskiey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine
\nbeing and the divine Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily inferior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>548<\/font> <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very
\nprinciple is love and love means always two, the lover and the beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spiritual experience, and because it seeks after the personal God while the Impersonal is the highest and the eternal truth, if not
\neven the sole Reality. But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner
\nadoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations
\nwith the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union. Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and
\nit gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness,
\nby which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than
\nthat thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its
\ncontrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself
\nby its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against
\nthe other.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThought in the mind, vicā<\/font>ra<\/i>, the philosophic trend by which mental knowledge approaches the Divine, is apt to lend a greater
\nimportance to the abstract over the concrete, to that which is high and remote over that which is intimate and near. It finds
\na greater truth in the delight of the One in itself, a lesser truth or even a falsehood in the delight of the One in the Many and
\nof the Many in the One, a greater truth in the impersonal and the Nirguna, a lesser truth or a falsehood in the personal and
\nthe Saguna. But the Divine is beyond our oppositions of ideas, beyond the logical contradictions we make between his aspects.
\nHe is not, we have seen, bound and restricted by exclusive unity; his oneness realises itself in infinite variation and to the joy
\nof that love has the completest key, without therefore missing the joy of the unity. The highest knowledge and highest spiritual experience by knowledge find his oneness as perfect in his  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>549<\/font>
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t various relations with the Many as in his self-absorbed delight. If
\nto thought the Impersonal seems the wider and higher truth, the Personal a narrower experience, the spirit finds both of them to
\nbe aspects of a Reality which figures itself in both, and if there is a knowledge of that Reality to which thought arrives by insistence
\non the infinite Impersonality, there is also a knowledge of it to which love arrives by insistence on the infinite Personality. The
\nspiritual experience of each leads, if followed to the end, to the same ultimate Truth. By Bhakti as by knowledge, as the Gita tells
\nus, we arrive at unity with the Purushottama, the Supreme who contains in himself the impersonal and numberless personalities,
\nthe qualitiless and infinite qualities, pure being, consciousness and delight and the endless play of their relations. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe devotee on the other hand tends to look down on the sawdust dryness of mere knowledge. And it is true that philosophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction
\nwe seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much
\nin an abstract delight and that what it reaches, is not indeed the void it seems to the passion of the heart, but still has the limitations of the peaks. On the other hand, love itself is not complete without knowledge. The Gita distinguishes between three initial
\nkinds of Bhakti, that which seeks refuge in the Divine from the
\nsorrows of the world, ā<\/font>rta<\/i>, that which, desiring, approaches 
\nthe Divine as the giver of its good, arthā<\/font>rthī<\/font><\/i>, and that which attracted by what it already loves, but does not yet know, yearns  to know this divine Unknown, jijnā<\/font>su<\/i>; but it gives the palm to
\nthe Bhakti that knows. Evidently the intensity of passion which says, “I do not understand, I love,” and, loving, cares not to
\nunderstand, is not love’s last self-expression, but its first, nor is it its highest intensity. Rather as knowledge of the Divine grows,
\ndelight in the Divine and love of it must increase. Nor can mere rapture be secure without the foundation of knowledge; to live
\nin what we love, gives that security, and to live in it means to be one with it in consciousness, and oneness of consciousness
\nis the perfect condition of knowledge. Knowledge of the Divine <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>550<\/font> 
\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t gives to love of the Divine its firmest security, opens to it its
\nown widest joy of experience, raises it to its highest pinnacles of outlook. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf the mutual misunderstandings of these two powers are an ignorance, no less so is the tendency of both to look down
\non the way of works as inferior to their own loftier pitch of spiritual achievement. There is an intensity of love, as there
\nis an intensity of knowledge, to which works seem something outward and distracting. But works are only thus outward and
\ndistracting when we have not found oneness of will and consciousness with the Supreme. When once that is found, works
\nbecome the very power of knowledge and the very outpouring of love. If knowledge is the very state of oneness and love its bliss,
\ndivine works are the living power of its light and sweetness. There is a movement of love, as in the aspiration of human love,
\nto separate the lover and the loved in the enjoyment of their exclusive oneness away from the world and from all others,
\nshut up in the nuptial chambers of the heart. That is perhaps an inevitable movement of this path. But still the widest love
\nfulfilled in knowledge sees the world not as something other and hostile to this joy, but as the being of the Beloved and all
\ncreatures as his being, and in that vision divine works find their joy and their justification. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is the knowledge in which an integral Yoga must live. We have to start God-ward from the powers of the mind, the
\nintellect, the will, the heart, and in the mind all is limited. Limitations, exclusiveness there can hardly fail to be at the beginning
\nand for a long time on the way. But an integral Yoga will wear these more loosely than more exclusive ways of seeking, and it
\nwill sooner emerge from the mental necessity. It may commence with the way of love, as with the way of knowledge or of works;
\nbut where they meet, is the beginning of its joy of fulfilment. Love it cannot miss, even if it does not start from it; for love is
\nthe crown of works and the flowering of knowledge.   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>551<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, c. 1915-1918     Part III The Yoga of Divine Love   Chapter I   Love and the Triple Path…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","wpcat-46-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}