Chapter XXVIII   Diversity in Oneness   IT IS essential to keep constantly in view the fundamental powers and realities of life if we are not to be betrayed by the arbitrary rule of the logical reason and its attachment to the rigorous and limiting idea into experiments which, however convenient in practice and however captivating to a unitarian and symmetrical thought, may well destroy the vigour and impoverish the roots of life. For that which is perfect and satisfying to the system of the logical reason, may yet ignore the truth of life and the living needs of the race. Unity is an idea which is not at all arbitrary or unreal; for unity

Chapter II   The Imperfection of Past Aggregates   THE WHOLE process of Nature depends on a balancing and a constant tendency to harmony between two poles of life, the individual whom the whole or aggregate nourishes and the whole or aggregate which the individual helps to constitute. Human life forms no exception to the rule. Therefore the perfection of human life must involve the elaboration of an as yet unaccomplished harmony between these two poles of our existence, the individual and the social aggregate. The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of

Chapter XI   The Reason as Governor of Life   REASON using the intelligent will for the ordering of the inner and the outer life is undoubtedly the highest developed faculty of man at his present point of evolution; it is the sovereign, because the governing and self-governing faculty in the complexities of our human existence. Man is distinguished from other terrestrial creatures by his capacity for seeking after a rule of life, a rule of his being and his works, a principle of order and self-development, which is not the first instinctive, original, mechanically self-operative rule of his natural existence. The principle he looks to is neith

Self-Determination   A NEW phrase has recently been cast out from the bloodstained yeast of war into the shifty language of politics, — that strange language full of Maya and falsities, of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for, — it is the luminous description of liberty as the just power, the freely exercised right of self-determination. The word is in itself a happy discovery, a thought-sign of real usefulness. For it helps to make definite and manageable what was apt ti

Chapter IV   The Discovery of the Nation-Soul   THE PRIMAL law and purpose of the individual life is to seek its own self-development. Consciously or half consciously or with an obscure unconscious groping it strives always and rightly strives at self-formulation, — to find itself, to discover within itself the law and power of its own being and to fulfil it. This aim in it is fundamental, right, inevitable because, even after all qualifications have been made and caveats entered, the individual is not merely the ephemeral physical creature, a form of mind and body that aggregates and dissolves, but a being, a living power of the eternal Truth, a

Chapter III   The Group and the Individual   IT IS a constant method of Nature, when she has two elements of a harmony to reconcile, to proceed at first by a long continued balancing in which she sometimes seems to lean entirely on one side, sometimes entirely to the other, at others to correct both excesses by a more or less successful temporary adjustment and moderating compromise. The two elements appear then as opponents necessary to each other who therefore labour to arrive at some conclusion of their strife. But as each has its egoism and that innate tendency of all things which drives them not only towards sel

' ' by Sri Aurobindo Page 1 of 50 Hymns to the Lords of Light     The Guardians of the Light   SURYA, LIGHT AND SEER   THE RIG VEDA rises out of the ancient Dawn with the sound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light. Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in the thought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darkness and Ignorance. The battle of the Vedic Gods and Titans is a perpetual conflict between Day and Night for the possession of the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for the liberation or bondage of the mind, life

The Twenty-Fifth Hymn to Agni   A HYMN TO THE LORD OF LIGHT AND CREATOR OF GODHEAD   [The Rishi hymns Agni as the Seer-Will whose whole being is the light and the truth and the lavishing of the substance of divinity. He is the son born to the thought of the seers and he gives himself as the godhead born in man who is the son of our works opulent with the divine Truth and the divine Power and as the conquering steed of the journey and the battle. The whole movement of the Seer-Will is upward to the light and vastness of the superconscient; his voice is as if the thunder-chant of those heavens. He shall carry us by his perfect workin

XII   Vishnu, the All-Pervading Godhead   Rig Veda I.154     1. Of Vishnu now I declare the mighty works, who has measured out the earthly worlds and that higher seat of our self-accomplishing he supports, he the wide-moving, in the threefold steps of his universal movement.     2. That Vishnu affirms on high by his mightiness and he is like a terrible lion that ranges in the difficult places, yea, his lair is on the mountain-tops, he in whose three wide movements all the worlds find their dwelling-place.     3. Let our strength and our thought go forward t

The Third Hymn to Agni   THE DIVINE FORCE, CONQUEROR OF THE SUPREME GOOD   [The Divine Will-Force is that of which all the other godheads are forms and he manifests all these powers of supreme Truth as he grows in us. Thus the supreme state of conscious being is attained and by that our complex and manifold existence is maintained in the Light and the Joy. The Rishi prays that the evil may not be allowed to express itself again in him, that the secret soul in us who is the Father of things but in us appears as the child of our works and our evolution, may open itself to the vast Truth-consciousness. The Divine Flame will dest