IX VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE There have been religions, approaches to the Divine, which did not believe in the divinity of man, the Chaldean line, the Semetic, for example. According to these, the Creator and the Created are separate in nature and being; to call anything created as God himself is blasphemy. The ancient Egyptian, the Hebrew or the Muslim place God high in Paradise, and, in their view, man can be only his servant or slave, his worker or warrior. Man is too small and too earthly to be ever identified with God: he can only be a worshipper. Man can love God, at the most, as his Beloved. But this devotion is for something afar,

XII THE SOUL AND ITS JOURNEY I When a man dies, his soul or psychic being, after a time goes to the psychic world and takes rest there till the hour comes to take birth again in another body upon earth. There are then these two periods in the life after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory—the brain mind

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (Part V) (Based on Talks with the Mother) NOLINI KANTA GUPTA Sri Aurobindo Library Madras First published in 1949 by Sri Aurobindo Library 369 Esplanade, G. T. Madras Printed in India at The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry All rights reserved

VI THE ROLE OF EVIL The advent or the presence of evil upon earth has introduced certain factors in human life that have enriched it, increased even its value. Certain experiences would not have been there, intimate and revelatory experiences, but for this Dark Shadow. One can, of course, conceive a line of growth and development in which it is all light and delight, everything is good and for the good. But then a whole domain of experience and realisation would have been missed. There are certain experiences that one would not like not to have had at all, even though that may mean paying and paying heavily. Evil is evil, no doubt; it is not divine and it i