Supermind and the Life Divine A DIVINE life upon earth, the ideal we have placed before us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being and a radical and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution of our nature. The embodied being upon earth would have to rise out of the domination over it of its veils of mind, life and body into the full consciousness and possession of its spiritual reality and its nature also would have to be lifted out of the consciousness and power of consciousness proper to a mental, vital and physical being into the greater consciousness and greater power of being and the larger and freer life of the spirit. It would no

The End THE meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the Divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending. Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably. And what is the mi

Man, the Purusha GOD cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting. In man nature of the world becomes again self-conscious so that it may take the greater leap towards its Enjoyer. This is the Enjoyer whom unknowingly it possesses, whom life and sensation possessing deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God, only because it knows not itself; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being. Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret

Karma and Freedom THE universe in which we live presents itself to our mentality as a web of opposites and contraries, not to say contradictions, and yet it is a question whether there can be in the universe any such thing as an entire opposite or a real contradiction. Good and evil seem to be as opposite powers as well can be and we are apt by the nature of our ethical mind to see the world, at any rate in its moral aspect, as a struggle and tug-of-war between these eternal opposites, God and Devil, Deva and Asura, Ahuramazda, Angrya Mainyu: We hope always that on some as yet hardly conceivable day the one will perish and the other triumph and be convinced of eternity

Animal Souls, Subtle Bodies Are any of the following queries touched in Sanatana Dharma books of philosophy? The nature and formation of animal soul. The shape, size, formations, nature and colour of subtle bodies. The difference between the subtle bodies of saints and ordinary people and the process of developing one into the other. The rationale of the reincarnation theory. The nature, constituents and situation of invisible worlds. THE first three questions are of a curious interest, the last two cover a very wide field. All except the fourth belong more or less to a kind of knowle

The Reincarnating Soul Human thought in the generality of men is no more than a rough and crude acceptance of unexamined ideas; it is sleepy sentry and allows anything to pass the gates which seems to it decently garbed or wears a plausible appearance or can mumble anything that resembles some familiar password. Especially is this so in subtle matters, those remote from the concrete facts of our physical life and environment. Even men who will reason carefully and acutely in ordinary matters and there consider vigilance against error an intellectual or a practical duty, are yet content with the most careless stumbling when they get upon higher and more difficult g

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE I. The eight essays of THE SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION, the last of Sri Aurobindo's prose writings, first appeared in the quarterly Bulletin of Physical Education in 1949-50. They were reprinted in book form by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press in 1952 under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth. Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, published them in 1953 under the caption The Mind of Light. II. The essays constituting THE PROBLEM OF REBIRTH first appeared serially in the Arya between 1915 and 1920. The first section, "Rebirth and Karma", consists of a number of independent articles which nevertheless make up a developing seri

Thoughts and Glimpses SOME think it presumption to believe in a special Providence or to look upon oneself as an instrument in the hands of God, but I find that every man has a special Providence and I see that God uses the mattock of the labourer and babbles in the mouth of a little child. Providence is not only that which saves me from the ship- wreck in which everybody else has foundered. Providence is also that which, while all others are saved, snatches away my last plank of safety and drowns me in the solitary ocean. The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross sh

APPENDIX Explanations given by Sri Aurobindo apropos of some passages in this book: Page 417, line 2. There is no need to put "the" before "quality" - in English that would alter the sense. Matter is not regarded in this passage as a quality of being perceived by sense; I don't think that would have any meaning. It is regarded as a result of a certain power and action of consciousness which presents forms of itself to sense perception and it is this quality of sense perceivedness, so to speak, that gives them the appearance of Matter, i.e. of a certain kind of substantiality inherent in themselves - but in fact they are not self-existent substantial objects but forms of consc

Karma, Will and Consequence WILL, Karma and consequence are the three steps of the Energy which moves the universe. But Karma and consequence are only the outcome of will or even its forms; will gives them their value and without it they would be nothing, nothing at least to man the thinking and growing soul and nothing, it may be hazarded, to the Spirit of which he is a flame and power as well as a creature. The thing we first see or imagine we see, when we look at the outward mechanism of the universe, is energy and its works, action and consequence. But by itself and without the light of an inhabiting will this working is only a huge soulless mechanism, a l