CHAPTER XXV The Knot of Matter I cannot travel to the Truth of the luminous Lord by force or by the duality.... Who are they that protect the foundation of the falsehood? Who are the guardians of the unreal word? Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid-world was not nor the Ether nor what is beyond. What covered all? where was it? in whose refuge? what was that ocean dense and deep? Death was not nor immortality nor the knowledge of day and night. That One lived without breath by his self-law, there was nothing else nor aught beyond it. In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness, all this was an ocean of inconscience. When universal bein

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 error of division and partial experience. This is the fall of man typified in the poetic pa

CHAPTER XII Delight of Existence: The Solution The name of That is the Delight; as the Delight we must worship and seek after It. Kena Upanishad.¹ IN THIS conception of an inalienable underlying delight of existence of which all outward or surface sensations are a positive, negative or neutral play, waves and foamings of that infinite deep, we arrive at the true solution of the problem we are examining. The self of things is an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowl

CHAPTER XXVI The Ascending Series of Substance There is a self that is of the essence of Matter—there is another inner self of Life that fills the other—there is another inner self of Mind—there is another inner self of Truth-Knowledge—there is another inner self of Bliss. Taittiriya Upanishad.¹ They climb Indra like a ladder. As one mounts peak after peak, there becomes clear the much that has still to be done. Indra brings consciousness of That as the goal. Like a hawk, a kite He settles on the Vessel and upbears it; in His stream of movement He discovers the Rays, for He goes bearing his weapons: He cleaves to the ocean surge of the w

CHAPTER XII The Origin of the Ignorance By energism of consciousness 1 Brahman is massed; from that Matter is born and from Matter Life and Mind and the worlds. Mundaka Upanishad.2 He desired, “May I be Many”, he concentrated in Tapas, by Tapas he created the world; creating, he entered into it; entering, he became the existent and the beyond-existence, he became the expressed and the unexpressed, he became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and the falsehood: he became the truth, even all this whatsoever that is. “That Truth” they call him. Taittiriya Upanishad.3 Energism of consciousness1 is Brahman. Ta

CHAPTER XI Delight of Existence: The Problem For who could live or breathe if there were not this delight of existence as the ether in which we dwell? From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return. Taittiriya Upanishad.¹ BUT even if we accept this pure Existence, this Brahman, this Sat as the absolute beginning, end and continent of things and in Brahman an inherent self-consciousness inseparable from its being and throwing itself out as a force of movement of consciousness which is creative of forces, forms and worlds, we have yet no answer to the question “Why should Brahman, pe

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE LIFE DIVINE first appeared serially in the Arya from August 1914 to January 1919. Volume I, revised and enlarged, was first published in book from in November 1939; Volume II, recast and enlarged, followed in July 1940, in two parts. These were reprinted in 1943 and 1947. The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, issued a single volume edition in 1949 and reprinted it in 1951. An edition under the imprint of the Sri Aurobindo international Centre of Education,  also in a single volume, appeared in 1955 and was reprinted in 1960. The India Library Society Edition (New York) came out in 1965. The present edition in two volumes forms part of the Co

CHAPTER XXIV Matter He arrived at the knowledge that Matter is Brahman. Taittiriya Upanishad.¹ WE HAVE now the rational assurance that Life is neither an inexplicable dream nor an impossible evil that has yet become a dolorous fact, but a mighty pulsation of the divine All-Existence. We see something of its foundation and its principle, we look upward to its high potentiality and ultimate divine out-flowering. But there is one principle below all the others which we have not yet sufficiently considered, the principle of Matter upon which Life stands as upon a pedestal or out of which it evolves like the form of a many-branching tree out of its encasing seed.

-31_Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti.htm CHAPTER II Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti It is there in beings indivisible and as if divided. Gita.1 Brahman, the Truth, the Knowledge, the Infinite. Taittiriya Upanishad.2 Know Purusha and Prakriti to be both eternal without beginning. Gita.3 One must know Maya as Prakriti and the Master of Maya as the great Lord of all. Swetaswatara Upanishad. 4 It is the might of the Godhead in the world that turns the wheel of Brahman. Him one must know, the supreme Lord of all lords, the supreme Godhead above all godheads. Supreme too is his Shakti and manifold the natural working of h

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, the initial and the ultimate reality of all that