On Love

THE HIDDEN PLAN- Poem by Sri Aurobindo

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The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the Divine into the human and a self immergence of man in the Divinity. But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.

Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses

What is there new that we have yet to accomplish ? Love, for as yet we have only accomplished hatred and self pleasing; Knowledge, for as yet we have only accomplished error and perception and conceiving; Bliss, for as yet we have only accomplished pleasure and pain and indifference; Power , for as yet we have only accomplished weakness and effort and a defeated victory; Life, for as yet we have only accomplished birth and growth and dying; Unity, for as yet we have only accomplished war and association.In a word godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.

Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Bk. XI, The Book of Everlasting Day

The gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest dynamis of the spiritual existence. The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. ...He would feel the presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness, in every vibration of his life-force, in every cell of his body. In all the workings of his force of Nature he would be aware of the workings of the supreme World-Mother, the Supernature; he would see his natural being as the becoming and the manifestation of the power of the World-Mother. In this consciousness he would live and act in an entire transcendent freedom, a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity with the cosmic self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All beings would be to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness would be felt as the ways and powers of his own universality His own life and the world life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would be as if the creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a multitudinous order. The gnostic individual would be in the world and of the world, but would also exceed it in his consciousness and live in his self of transcendence above it; he would be universal but free in the universe, individual but not limited by a separative individuality. ...

One in self with all, the supramental being will seek the delight of self-manifestation of the Spirit in himself but equally the delight of the Divine in all : he will have the cosmic joy and will be a power for bringing the bliss of the spirit, the joy of being to others; for their joy will be part of his own joy of existence. ...His feeling of universality, his action of universality will be always a spontaneous state and natural movement, an automatic expression of the Truth, an act of the joy of the spirit's self-existence. There could be in it no place for limited self or desire or for the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or the satisfaction or frustration of desire, no place for the relative and dependent happiness and grief that visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are things that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth of the Spirit. ... The gnostic existence and delight of existence is a universal and total being and delight, and there will be the presence of that totality and universality in each separate movement: in each there will be, not a partial experience of self or a fractional bit of his joy,. but the sense of the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and integral bliss of being, Ananda.

The gnostic life will be an inner life in which the antinomy of the inner and the outer, the self and the world will have been cured and exceeded. The gnostic being will have indeed an inmost existence in which he is alone with God, one with the Eternal, self-plunged into the depths of the Infinite, in communion with its heights and its luminous abysses of secrecy; no- thing will be able to disturb or to invade these depths or bring him down from the summits, neither the world's contents not his action nor all that is around him. This is the transcendence aspect of the spiritual life and it is necessary for the freedom of the spirit; for otherwise the identity in Nature with the world would be a binding limitation and not a free identity. But at the same time God-love and the delight of God will be the heart's expression of that inner communion and oneness, and that delight and love will expand itself to embrace all existence. The peace of God within will be extended in the gnostit experience of the universe into a universal calm of equality not merely passive but dynamic, a calm of freedom in oneness dominating all that meets it, tranquillising all that enters into it, imposing its law of peace on the supramental being's relations with the world in which he is living. ...It is this poise and freedom in the spirit that will enable him to take all life into him- self while still remaining the spiritual self and to embrace even the world of the Ignorance without himself entering into the Ignorance. ...

Love will be for him the contact, meeting, union of self with self, of spirit with spirit, a unification of being, a power and joy and intimacy and closeness of soul to soul, of the One to the One, a joy of identity and the consequences of a diverse identity. It is the joy of an intimate self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous union of the One and a happy interaction in the identity, that will be for him the full revealed sense of life. Creation aesthetic or dynamic, mental creation, life creation, material creation will have for him the" same sense. It will be the creation of significant forms of the Eternal Force, Light, Beauty, Reality,-the beauty and truth of its forms and bodies, the beauty and truth of its powers and qualities, the beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence.

As a consequence of the total change and reversal of consciousness establishing a new relation of spirit with mind and life and matter, and a new significance and perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal, a perfecting new significance also of the relations between the spirit and the body it inhabits. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. ... This calm and this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite. ..this fundamental ecstasy of being.

.. translates [in the mind] into a calm of intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and knowledge, in the heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal union and love and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In the will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-power in action or a beatitude of the senses perceiving and meeting the One everywhere, perceiving as their normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty and a secret harmony of creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect glimpses or a rare supernormal sense. In the body it reveals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the spirit and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised physical existence. A universal beauty and glory of being begins to manifest; all objects reveal hidden lines, vibrations, powers, harmonic significances concealed from the normal mind and the physical sense. In the universal phenomenon is revealed the eternal Ananda.

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, ch. 55. or The Future Evolution of Man, VIII

A spiritual or gnostic being would feel his harmony with the whole gnostic life around him, whatever his position in the whole. According to his place in it he would know how to lead or to rule, but also how to subordinate himself; both would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit's freedom, because it is eternal, self-existent and inalienable, can be felt as much in service and willing subordination and adjustment with other selves as in power and rule. An inner spiritual freedom can accept its place in the truth of an inner spiritual hierarchy as well as in the truth, not incompatible with it, of a fundamental spiritual equality. It is this self-arrangement of Truth, a natural order of the spirit, that would exist in a common life of different degrees and stages of the evolving gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness, mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity, harmony the inevitable power of the working of its force. Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law ,of a common or collective gnostic life. What forms it might .

take would depend upon the will of evolutionary manifestation of the Supernature, but this would be its general character and principle .

The one rule of the gnostic life would be the self-expression of the Spirit, the will of the Divine Being; that will, that self- expression could manifest through extreme simplicity or through extreme complexity and opulence or in their natural balance, -for beauty and plenitude, a hidden sweetness and laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness of life are also powers and expressions of the Spirit. In all directions the Spirit within determining the law of the nature would determine the frame of the life and its detail and circumstance. In all there would be the same plastic principle; a rigid standardization, however necessary for the mind's arrangement of things, could not be the law of the spiritual life. A great diversity and liberty of self-expression based on an underlying unity might well become manifest; but everywhere there would be harmony and truth of order .

A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterized as a divine life ; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level, as a life of spiritual and supramental superman hood. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood; for superman hood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human level, not in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the forces of the human Ignorance; it carries also, commonly implied in it, the idea of a forceful domination over humanity by the superman. That would mean a super- manhood of the Nietzschean type; it might be at its worst the reign of the 'blond beast' or the dark beast or of any and every beast, a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and force : but this would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism.

Rut earth has had enough of this kind in her past and its repetition can only prolong the old lines; she can get no true profit for her future, no power of self-exceeding, from the Titan, the Asura: even a great or supernormal power in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old orbit, But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple ; it is a self-realized being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and beauty,-not an egoistic superman- hood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness in which huminity itself shall find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature..

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The old spirituality was an escape from life towards the divine Reality, leaving the world where it was, as it was. Our new vision, on the contrary , is the divinisation of life, the transformation of the material into a divine world....

This work could have been a simple continuation, an amelioration, an enlargement of the old world as it was But what has happened is truly a new thing, a new world has been born. It is not the old that is being transformed, it is quite a new world that has been really concretely born.

At the present hour we are in the very heart of a period of transition, where the two are intertwined: the old persists, still all powerful, and continues to dominate the ordinary consciousness, while the new glides in, still very modest, unnoticed to the extent that for the moment it disturbs nothing much externally. ...

In any case, to simplify one can say that the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was in a characteristic way the age of the gods and therefore the age of religions. ...In the supramental creation there will no more be religions. All life will be the expression, the flowering in forms of the Divine Unity manifesting in the world. And there will be no more what men now call the gods.

These great divine beings themselves will be able to participate in the new creation, but for that they must put on what we may call the supramental substance on earth. And if there are some who choose to remain in their world, as they are, if they decide not to manifest themselves physically, their relation with the other beings of the supramental world on earth will be a relation of friends, of collaborators, of equal to equal, because the highest divine essence will have manifested in the beings of the new supramental world on earth.

When the physical substance will be supramentalised, to be born on earth in a body will not be a cause of inferiority; rather the contrary , there will be gained a plenitude which could not be obtained otherwise. ...

I invite you to the great adventure, and in this adventure you are not to repeat spiritually what others have done before us, because our adventure begins from beyond that stage. We are for a new creation, entirely new, carrying in it all the unforeseen, all risks, all hazards,-a true adventure of which the goal is sure victory, but of which the way is unknown and has to be traced out step by step in the unexplored.

The Mother, Questions and Answers, Bulletin, Nov. 1957