Chapter XXVII   The Sevenfold Chord of Being   In the ignorance of my mind, I ask of these steps of the Gods that are set within. The all-knowing Gods have taken the Infant of a year and they have woven about him seven threads to make this weft. Rig Veda.1   WE HAVE now, by our scrutiny of the seven great terms of existence which the ancient seers fixed on as the foundation and sevenfold mode of all cosmic existence, discerned the gradations of evolution and involution and arrived at the basis of knowledge towards which we were striving. We have laid down that the origin, the continent, t

Chapter XXIII   The Double Soul in Man   The Purusha, the inner Self, no larger than the size of a man's  thumb. Katha Upanishad.1 Swetaswatara Upanishad.2   He who knows this Self who is the eater of the honey of existence and the lord of what is and shall be, has thenceforward no shrinking. Katha Upanishad.3   Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness? Isha Upanishad.4   He who has found the bliss of the Eternal has no fear from any quarter.

Chapter VII   The Ego and the Dualities     The soul seated on the same tree of Nature is absorbed and deluded and has sorrow because it is not the Lord, but when it sees and is in union with that other self and greatness of it which is the Lord, then sorrow passes away from it. Swetaswatara Upanishad.1     IF ALL is in truth Sachchidananda, death, suffering, evil, limitation can only be the creations, positive in practical effect, negative in essence, of a distorting consciousness which has fallen from the total and unifying knowledge of itself into some erro

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