On Love

Krishna - Poem by Sri Aurobindo

---

The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.

If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.

Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses

There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother. ...There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,-most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.

Sri Aurobindo, "The Mother", Part VI

Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange. ...Physical life does not desire to give itself, it desires only to receive. ...Love at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving and surrendering to others which it admits chiefly as a necessary price for the thing that it desires Its true law is to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving is equal to the joy of receiving and tends in the end to become even greater; but that is when it is shooting beyond itself under the pressure of the psychic flame to attain to the fulfilment of utter unity and has therefore to realise that which seemed to it not-self as an even greater and dearer self than its own individuality.

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, I, ch. XXI

Men's way of doing things well is through a clear mental connection; they see things and do things with the mind and what they want is a mental and human perfection. When they think of a manifestation of Divinity, they think it must be an extraordinary perfection in doing ordinary human things-an extraordinary business faculty, political, poetic or artistic faculty, an accurate memory , not making mistakes, not undergoing any defect or failure. Or else they think of things which they call superhuman like not eating food or telling cotton-futures or sleeping on nails or eating them [one could add many other things, such as curing diseases or making pass an examination successfully. Pavitra.] All that has nothing to do with manifesting the Divine. ...These human ideas are false.

The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to man's ideas of what It should or should not do. This is the first thing one must grasp, otherwise one can understand nothing about the manifestation of the Divine.

Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibian animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as a dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again to the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development-Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.

As for the lives in between the Avatar lives, it must be remembered that Krishna speaks of many lives in the past, not only a few supreme ones, and secondly while he speaks of himself as the Divine, in one passage he describes himself as a Vibhuti We may therefore fairly assume that in many lives he manifested as a Vibhuti veiling the fuller Divine Consciousness. If we admit that the object of Avatarhood is to lead the evolution, this is quite reasonable, the Divine appearing as Avatar in the great transitional stages and as Vibhutis to aid the lesser transition.

Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga, II, tome I, part I, 7

The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example and declares of himself that he is the way and the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body and the supreme Lord and friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity.

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, I, 15

The phrase "central being" in our yoga is usually applied to the portion of the Divine in us which supports all the rest and survives through death and birth. This central being has two forms-above, it is the Jivatman, our true being, of which we become aware when the higher knowledge comes, -below, it is the psychic being which stands behind mind, body and life. The Jivatman is above the manifestation in life and presides over it; the psychic being stands behind the manifestation in life and supports it.

The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the Child, the Son of God, the Bhakta; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference. The Jivatman, on the contrary , lives in the essence and can merge itself in identity with the Divine; but it too, the moment it presides over the dynamics of the manifestation, knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara.

Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga, II, tome I, part 1,5

There is and can be no psychic being in a non-evolutionary creature like the Asura; there can be none in a god who does not need one for his existence. ...If any being of the typal worlds wants to evolve, he has to come down to earth and take a human body and accept to share in the evolution. It is because they do not want to do this that the vital beings try to possess men in order that they may enjoy the materialities of physical life without having the burden of the evolution or the process of conversion in which it culminates.

Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga, II, tome I, part 1,6

Krishna the Divine Flute-player

Commenting on the above passage in the Bulletin, February 1961, Questions and Answers, the Mother says :

Krishna the divine Flute-player is the immanent and universal Divine who is the supreme power of attraction; and Radha the soul, the psychic personality answers to the call of the Flute-player. ...But as soon as there is the perfect identification all that vanishes. ..the story comes to its end and there is nothing more to relate.

That is why it has been said that if the world, if the creation realised perfect identity with the Divine, there would be no more creation The solution [of this contradiction] is to find the Ananda in the very midst of the Play where one gives and takes, where one seems to be two; this is why the Vaishnavas and the mystics keep the taste of the duality. Otherwise in identity there is only identity. If the identity is complete and perfect there is no more objectivisation.

I have already said. ..that that begins by the Ananda of identity and at the end of the entire circuit of creation that ends in the Ananda of the union. Had there been no circuit, there would never have been the Ananda of the union; there would only have been the Ananda of identity.

The Mother

Delight is the creator, Delight is the fulfiller

It is with the sense of separation that pain and suffering, misery and ignorance and all the incapacities have come. And it is with self-giving, self-forgetfulness in a total consecration that suffering will disappear and give place to a Delight that nothing can obscure.

It is only when this Delight is established in this world that it can be truly transformed, then only there will be a new life, a new creation, anew realisation. The Delight must first be established in the consciousness, then the material transformation will take place, not before.

Note that I do not speak of what people call delight, which is not even a caricature of true Delight, but rather a diabolical invention to make you lose the way, the delight or joy that comes from pleasure, forgetfulness, indifference. What I speak of is a Delight that is perfect peace, light without shadow, harmony, beauty whole and entire and irresistible power, the Delight that is the Divine Presence itself, in its essence, in its will and in its realisation.

It is with the Adversary that suffering has come into the world. And it is Delight alone that can conquer it, nothing else can conquer it definitely, finally.

Delight is the creator, Delight is the fulfiller.

The Mother, Questions and Answers, Bulletin, February 1960

Origin of all Avatars

[1t is] a very old tradition, older than the two known lines of tradition from the spiritual and occult point of view, that is to say the Vedic and the Chaldean lines, a tradition which seems to have been at the origin of these two known traditions and in which it is said that when the world, because of the action of the adverse forces-the Asuras of Indian tradition-was plunged into the obscurity, inconscience and ignorance that we know, instead of developing in the natural law of Light and Consciousness, the creative Power implored the supreme Origin asking for a special intervention that would be able to save this corrupt universe. And in answer to this prayer, a special Entity emanated from the supreme Origin, an Entity made of Love and Consciousness that was projected directly into the most inconscient matter to begin the work of reawakening to the original Consciousness and Love.

In ancient narratives, this Being is described as lying stretched in deep sleep at the bottom of a dark cave and from it as it lay asleep emanated rays of prismatic light which spread gradually into the Inconscience and was lodged in every element of the lnconscience so that it may start its work of Reawakening.

If you consciously enter this Inconscient, you can still see the same marvellous Being, ever lying in deep sleep and continuing its work of emanation, spreading its light; it will continue to do it until Inconscience is no longer Inconscience, until Obscurity disappears from the world and all creation awakes to the Supramental Consciousness.

And it is worth noticing that this marvellous Being strangely resembles the person whom I saw in vision one day, the Being who is at the other extremity, at the limit of the form and the formless. But this one was in his golden crimson glory whereas the other one in his sleep was diamond white emanating opal rays.

It is this one who is the origin of all Avatars. He is, so to say, the original and universal Avatar who has gradually put on bodies more and more conscious and in the end has manifested in the somewhat known line of Beings who descended directly from the Supreme to perfect the work of preparing the world so that it might, by continuous progress, be ready to receive and manifest the Supramental Light in its entirety.

In every country, in every tradition this fact has been presented in a particular way with different restrictions, different details, individual specialities, but in reality the origin of all the stories is the same, and that is what we may call a direct and conscious intervention of the Supreme in the obscurest matter without passing through intermediaries to awaken this matter to aspiration towards divine Forces.

The interval separating these different incarnations seems to become shorter and shorter, as if matter being more and more ready, the action could hasten and its movement become quicker and quicker, also more and more conscious, more and more effective and decisive.

And this action will go on multiplying and intensifying itself until the whole world becomes the full Avatar of the Supreme.

The Mother, Questions and Answers ,Bulletin, August 1958

Story Of The Creation

When the Supreme decided to exteriorise himself so that he might see himself, the first thing that he exteriorised out of himself was Knowledge of the world and Power to create it.. ..In the Supreme Will there was a plan and the first principle of this plan was the expression at once of Delight and Freedom, in their essence, which seemed to be the most interesting character of this creation. ...Intermediaries were needed to express this Delight and Freedom through forms. And Four Beings were first brought out to start the world-development which had to be a progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings, in the principle of their being, were Consciousness and Light, Life, Delight and Love, and Truth.

...As soon as they began their work, they started having their own conception of the work to be done and how it was to be done. Being wholly free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of a servant and instrument, they naturally took the attitude of a master, and this lapse, I may say, was the first cause, the essential cause of all disorder in the world. And as soon as there was separation-for that was the essential cause of separation-as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and that which had emanated, Consciousness was changed into unconsciousness, Light into darkness, Love into hate, Delight into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood The result is the world as we see it. It has been done progressively, step by step, and it would be really too long to tell you all that; however, the culmination at the end was matter , obscure, inconscient, miserable.

The creative Force which had brought out these Four Beings essentially for the creation of the world observed what was happening and turned to the Supreme and implored Him for the remedy and cure of the evil that had been done.

Then the order was given, Consciousness to precipitate into the inconscience, Love into the suffering, Truth into the falsehood. And it was a greater Consciousness, a more total Love, a more perfect Truth than what had emanated in the beginning that now plunged into the horror of matter to awaken there consciousness and love and light, to begin that movement of Redemption which must bring back the material universe to its supreme origin.

The Mother, Questions and Answers, Bulletin, February 1958.