Opening Remarks
Sri Aurobindo now reveals to us how this ladder of consciousness, these different planes of consciousness came into existence, by what power, for what purpose.
Godhead’s fall
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godhead’s fall.
It is the Divine Mother who once in Her Transcendent state chose to go far from Her Home of Truth and Bliss so as to create and manifest what is hidden in the heart of the Supreme. She renounced Her divinity so that creation could be.
Holocaust of the Supreme
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
She gave Herself completely to the extent of total self-forgetfulness of all Her powers so that Godhead’s seed could flower and bear fruits in Space and Time.
The great sacrifice
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity’s lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
This plunge of the Divine into creation, termed in Indian spiritual thought as the sacrifice of the Purusha (or the masculine element of divinity) is, to Sri Aurobindo’s experience, much more the sacrifice of the Divine Mother (the feminine principle of divinity). It is She who has accepted the dark state of Inconscience and brought out of Her being the soul, the psychic element, that is there in each atom of existence. It is Her sacrifice that prepared the ground and provided the power for the Gods to work and create this many-patterned universe, these many-layered planes of consciousness with all their forces and energies and forms and personalities.
Idol of self
An idol of self is our mortality.
Behind our brief existence in time, behind our temporary figure of mortality, there stands the immortal soul which these countless lines of nature seek to express.
Our earth is a fragment
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
It means that hidden within tis earthly matter are tremendous possibilities since the very highest has made it His self-chosen home, along with all the other layers that lie in-between. It is the presence of these higher levels of consciousness that exist or reside within earth’s secret bosom that she is impelled to create and endure, dream and realise through a long process of evolution.
Return to immortality
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;
They are partners of her greater growing fate
And her return to immortality;
They consent to share her doom of birth and death;
They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive
Her blind laborious spirit to compose
A meagre image of the mighty Whole.
What is thus hidden in Matter must one day emerge. These forces that are held within her bosom and have the urge to emerge and express themselves are the cause of the evolutionary angst that is found upon earth.
The unseeing Power
The calm and luminous Intimacy within
Approves her work and guides the unseeing Power.
The unseeing Power is Nature that has its origin in the Divine Shakti. It is the Divine Mother who through Her sacrifice has chosen to thus conceal Herself while the luminous Intimacy within is the Divine Presence who sanctions all her works.
Vast design
His vast design accepts a puny start.
It is for the sake of the Purusha that She has left Her Home and entered this state of darkness and suffer diminution of Her powers. She becomes the infinitesimal particle of creation and lays it down as a base for the great and enormous adventure of the soul’s ascension.
A drawing half-done
An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world’s life;
Its lines doubt their concealed significance,
Its curves join not their high intended close.
Her work is not yet over. Creation is far from being finished and man is not its last term but an intermediate state. We must wait with trust and patience until the last act of the great epic of the soul and the drama of God is over.
Intuition’s sure technique
Yet some first image of greatness trembles there,
And when the ambiguous crowded parts have met
The many-toned unity to which they moved,
The Artist’s joy shall laugh at reason’s rules;
The divine intention suddenly shall be seen,
The end vindicate intuition’s sure technique.
It is not the power of reason but of Intuition that has gone forth in the making of this world. Reason cannot understand its ways and is often bewildered and stands aghast at the myriad workings of the cosmos that are so different and yet interlinked. But a time comes when we get glimpses of the Wisdom working in the heart of creation and can begin to understand something of its ways that defy logic and yet move infallibly towards a prefigured high goal.
A cube and union-crystal
A graph shall be of many meeting worlds,
A cube and union-crystal of the gods;
A Mind shall think behind Nature’s mindless mask,
A conscious Vast fill the old dumb brute Space.
The divine intention in creation is to manifest an all-encompassing perfect perfection that is transparent to the Divine Power and its many-sided workings. It is this towards which Nature strives and so shall it be since within this dumb Space, unseen and unfelt by our present mind, it is the Divine Mother’s Power and Knowledge that is working. One day we shall see behind the mask of Inconscient nature and behold within her the conscious Divine Presence that drives the atoms and the stars.
A little point reveal infinitudes
This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man
Shall stand out on the background of long Time
A glowing epitome of eternity,
A little point reveal the infinitudes.
At present still a small entity within man, vaguely felt in some dim far off inner space of man shall emerge in the forefront and reveal the Glory of the multitudinous One.
Closing Remarks
Thus Sri Aurobindo reveals to us the secret of evolution, the Power that works within it, the direction and the divine intent behind it.
