The Life Divine Publisher's Note   The Life Divine first appeared serially in the monthly review Arya between August 1914 and January 1919. Each instalment was written immediately before its publication. In 1939 and 1940 Sri Aurobindo revised The Life Divine for book publication. The first volume of the revised version, consisting of the first twenty-seven chapters of the Arya text, along with a newly written twenty-eighth chapter, was published in November 1939. The revision of all but two of the Arya chapters was light.

Chapter III   The Two Negations     2   The Refusal of the Ascetic     All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.   Beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all is still. Mandukya Upanishad.1     AND STILL there is a beyond. For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent, ―transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself,

Chapter II   The Two Negations     1   The Materialist Denial     He energised conscious-force (in the austerity of thought) and came to the knowledge that Matter is the Brahman. For from Matter all existences are born; born, by Matter they increase and enter into Matter in their passing hence. Then he went to Varuna, his father, and said, "Lord, teach me of the Brahman." But he said to him: "Energise (again) the conscious-energy in thee; for the Energy is Brahman."  Taittiriya Upanishad.1   THE AFFIRMATION of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sens

Chapter XVII   The Divine Soul   He whose self has become all existences, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad.1   BY THE conception we have formed of the Supermind, by its opposition to the mentality on which our human existence is based, we are able not only to form a precise instead of a vague idea of divinity and the divine life, ―expressions which we are otherwise condemned to use with looseness and as the vague wording of a large but almost impalpable aspiration, ―but also to give these ideas

Chapter XV   The Supreme Truth-Consciousness     One seated in the sleep of Superconscience, a massed Intelligence, blissful and the enjoyer of Bliss. . . . This is the omnipotent, this is the omniscient, this is the inner control, this is the source of all. Mandukya Upanishad.1     WE HAVE to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God