... he moves in his journey according to his own acts ... smaller than the hundredth part of the tip of a hair, the soul of the living being is capable of infinity. Male is he not nor female nor neuter ...
- Swetaswatara Upanishad
Mortals, they achieved immortality.
- Rig Veda
Man's being, nature, circumstances of life are the result of his own inner and outer activities, not something fortuitous and inexplicable; he is what he has made himself ...
Man is the creator of himself; he is the creator also of his fate.
... it must be ourself, our soul that fundamentally determines its own evolution ... our Spirit, our Self must be greater than its Karma. ... the more we go within, the soul's power of choice is increasingly felt.
Fate, whether purely mechanical or created by ourselves, a chain of our own manufacture, is only one factor of existence; Being and its consciousness and its will are a still more important factor. ... destiny ... binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene. ... behind our surface is a freer Life-power, a freer Mind-power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate.
... when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without restraint or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises a mass of reactions against itself, reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may have their result now or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to be used were exhausted ; the very forces that the ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power for his downfall... This reaction to his energies may come upon him in another life and not at once ... misuse of force which Nature admits but reacts in the end against it, receives the adverse return ...
... the soul's cosmic training ... All the secret of the circumstances of rebirth centres around the one capital need of the soul, the need of growth, the need of experience; that governs the line of its evolution and all the rest is accessory. ... It is only by a change of outer self, a constant progression of the nature, a growth in the spirit that we can justify our existence.
The law that deprives us of the memory of past lives is a law of the cosmic Wisdom and serves, not disserves its evolutionary purpose.
(Ch. XXII, Rebirth and Other Worlds)

... Manifested, he grows in the lap of their crookedness and becomes high, beautiful and glorious.
- Rig Veda
From the non-being to true being, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality.
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature's execution ...
[Upanishad] ... the gods... are powers of Consciousness and powers of Nature ... the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution.
The spiritual aspiration is innate in man; for he is, unlike the animal, aware of imperfection and limitation and feels that there is something to be attained beyond what he is now: this urge towards self-exceeding is not likely ever to die out totally in the race. The human mental status will always be there, but ... as an open step towards the spiritual and supramental status.
In the inner reality of things a change of consciousness was always the major fact, the evolution has always had a spiritual significance and the physical change was only instrumental ...
... Mind is an instrument of the Ignorance ...
Man's urge towards spirituality is the inner driving of the spirit within him towards emergence, the insistence of the Consciousness-Force of the being towards the next step of its manifestation.
If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature. (Ch. XXIII, Man and the Evolution)

Even as men come to Me, so I accept them. ... Those whose sacrifice is to the gods, to elemental spirits, reach the gods, reach the elemental spirits, but those whose sacrifice is to Me, to Me they come. - Gita

In these there is not the Wonder and the Might; the truths occult exist not for the mind of the ignorant.
- Rig Veda

Seer-wisdoms, secret words that speak their meaning to the seer.
- Rig Veda

None knows the birth of these; they know each other's way of begetting: but the Wise perceives
these hidden mysteries ... - Rig Veda
... the Wise, in union with the spiritual self, reach the Omnipresent everywhere
and enter into the All. - Mundaka Upanishad

... Nature's mute secrecy
Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: ... what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.
... the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him ...
When there is a complete silence in the being ... then we can become aware of a Self ... an existence exceeding even the soul-individuality
... a pressure of the psychic Entity on the mind, life and body to develop a true soul-action, a pressure of the Spirit or Self for liberation from the ego, from the surface ignorance ... When there is the decisive emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being ...

...spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism ... Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being ... an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature. ... there is a pull on it to accept and serve these powers, motives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous mixture, a constant temptation to fall or deviation ...
There are four necessities of man's self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of the surface ignorance ... He must know himself and discover and utilise all his potentialities; ... He must know also the hidden Power or Powers that control the world: ...
...all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness ... finally, there is the decisive emergence, a reversal of the consciousness, the beginning of the possibility of its radical change ... The thing done has not only to be confirmed, secured against relapse and the downward gravitation ... it has to become dominant, all-embracing, comprehensive. ... Ignorant and injurious and even disastrous elements may creep in and lead to error and evil; ... intolerant and challenging egoism ... the vital, its treacherous action on the mind ...
... that inferior stuff invades ... and often it diminishes, degrades and corrupts ... truth and error live always together in the human evolution ... what we see as error is very frequently the symbol or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a truth ... - the truth is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very commonly permits the good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a long time, because only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible.
...The mystics founded their endeavour on a power of suprarational knowledge, intuitive, inspired, revelatory and on the force of the inner being to enter into occult truth and experience: but these powers are not possessed by men in the mass ... At the same time the strong spiritual nucleus became mixed, diluted, alloyed; it tended to be invaded and aped by the lower elements of mind and life and physical nature. It was this mixture and alloy and invasion of the spurious, this profanation of the mysteries and the loss of their truth and significance, as well as the misuse of the occult power that comes by communication with invisible forces, that was most dreaded by the early mystics and prevented by secrecy, by strict discipline, by restriction to the few fit initiates. Another untoward result or peril of the diffusive movement and the consequent invasion has been the intellectual formalisation of spiritual knowledge into dogma ... a certain dryness and a narrowness and paucity of the spiritual life have been a frequent consequence.
... Occultism is in its essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical limits of being ... Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature, and of all that is in connection with the subliminal, including the subconscient and the superconscient, and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge.
...The sage and seer live in the spiritual mind, their thought or their vision is governed or moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of knowledge; the devotee lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking ... the others stand in the vital kinetic nature ...
Karuna : universal compassion
... the object of the mystic is self-knowledge and God-knowledge, and that can only be arrived at by an inward and not by an outward gaze. Or it is the supreme Truth of things that he seeks, and that too cannot be arrived at by an outward inquiry ... It must come by a direct vision or contact of the consciousness with the soul and body of the truth itself or through a knowledge by identity, by the self that becomes ONE with the self of things and with their truth of power and their truth of essence. ...
A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and integration must harmonise these diversities, but to abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.
(Ch. XXIV, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man)

A conscious being is the centre of the self, who rules past and future; he is like a fire without smoke ...
That, one must disengage with patience from one's own body.
- Katha Upanishad
An intuition in the heart sees that truth.
- Rig Veda
I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of ignorance
with the shining lamp of knowledge. - Gita
These rays are directed downwards, their foundation is above: may they be set deep within us ...
O Varuna, here awake, make wide thy reign ... - Rig Veda
The Swan that settles in the purity ... born of the Truth, - itself the Truth, the Vast.
- Katha Upanishad
... a soul-personality, a distinct psychic being ... As the psychic personality grows stronger ... it can transmit its intimations to the mind and heart and life with a greater purity and force; for it is more able to exercise a strong control and react against false mixture; now more and more it makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the nature.
... owing to this inexperience we can easily mistake something of the inner mind or vital self for the psychic ... But man cannot altogether act in the same way without forfeiting his prerogative of manhood; he cannot leave his being to be a chaos of instincts and impulses regulated by the automatism of Nature: ... Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs it: ... it can be perfectly done only if he goes within and finds whatever central being is by its predominant influence at the head of all his expression and action. In inmost truth it is his soul that is this central being, but in outer fact it is often one or other of the part beings in him that rules, and this ... he can mistake for the inmost soul-principle. ... This rule of different selves ... the physical man ... In others it is the vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will, the action; then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination and power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure ... At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in the mind as others live in the vital or physical nature. ... Mind in spite of its power is often impotent before the inconscient and subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. ... in most men ... an unstable equilibrium of a personality half formed, half in formations, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a central government. ... All must be transitional until a first, though not a final, true harmonisation is achieved by finding our real centre, for the true central being is the soul, but this being stands back and in most human natures is only the secret witness or, one might say, a constitutional ruler who allows his ministers to rule for him, delegates to them his empire, silently assents to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which they can at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is so long as the soul-personality put forward by the psychic entity is not yet sufficiently developed; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is by the coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up the reins of government that there can take place a real harmonisation of our being and our life.
A first condition of the soul's complete emergence is a direct contact in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. ...At first, it seeks this Reality through the good, the true, the beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but although this touch ... can modify and prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality itself is indispensable ... Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves primary and potent figures of the Reality, ... but ...
the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil, impersonal ... one must cease to be the surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. ... The outer nature has to undergo a change of poise ... There must grow up within us or there must manifest a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and higher being ... As the crust of the outer nature cracks ... invasion by the Infinite ... immortality becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a normal self-awareness ... the Power recedes, if there is ambition, vanity or other aggressive forms of lower self, the Light if there is an attachment to obscurity or to any form of the Ignorance, the Presence if the chamber of the heart has not been made pure....
... Overmind is, like Mind, a dividing principle ... Its tendency of totality is hampered by its selective tendency ... As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it. For all these steps forward are, like those before them, transitional; the whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct action in earth-existence. ... The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe. (Ch. XXV, The Triple Transformation)

Masters of the Truth-Light who make the Truth grow by the Truth. - Rig Veda
He is born a seer with the mind of discernment ... - Rig Veda
Beholding the higher Light beyond the darkness we came to the divine Sun in the Godhead,
to the highest Light of all. - Rig Veda
... As the summits of human mind are beyond animal perception, so the movements of Supermind are beyond the ordinary human mental conception: it is only when we have already had experience of a higher intermediate consciousness that any terms attempting to describe supramental being could convey a true meaning to our intelligence ... the Truth, the Right, the Vast which is the native kingdom of the free Spirit. ... the true knowledge and description must be left to the language of the mystic ... The transition to Supermind through Overmind is a passage from Nature as we know it into Supernature. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and occult in earth-Nature ... these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the level of our ignorance. In order that the involved principles of Overmind and Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the being and powers of the Superconscience must descend into us and uplift us and formulate themselves in our being and powers; this descent is a sine qua non of the transition and transformation. ... a secret pressure from above ... an intuitive mentality ... would be the first step of an ascending change ... for a real transformation there must be a direct and unveiled intervention from above; there would be necessary too a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness, a cessation of its insistence, a will in it for its separate law of action to be completely annulled by transformation and lose all rights over our being. If these two conditions can be achieved even now ... the transformation can take place by a comparatively swift conscious change ... no farther need of a slow evolution ... It is a first condition of this change that the mental Man we now are should become inwardly aware and in possession of his own deeper law of being and its processes; he must become the psychic and inner mental being master of his energies, no longer a slave of the movements of the lower Prakriti, in control of it ... An increasing control of the individual over his own action of nature ... In human mind there is the first appearance of an observing intelligence ... the knowledge also is limited and imperfect, it is a partial intelligence, a half understanding, groping ... There is not as yet a luminous seeing which knows things by a direct grasp ...

There would be no farther need of a slow evolution counting many millenniums for each step, the halting and difficult evolution operated by Nature in the past in the unconscious creatures of the Ignorance. ...... A harmonious other-world ..... imperfection due to a mixture of the old and new consciousness .... Our notion of free will is apt to be tainted with the excessive individualism of the human ego .... it is when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a lower Power that the will of the being becomes free from ... an ignorant subjection to the drive of this inferior Nature. ... Thus the individuality would become more and more powerful and effective in proportion as it realised itself as a centre and formation of the universal and transcendent Being and Nature. ... In place of the Nature of Ignorance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-conscious instrument, there would be a Supernature of the divine Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free field and instrument ... aware of its purpose ... yet an individual being of Its being ...
... the obscure harmony of a blind automatism ... In this higher state the consciousness will see that Truth ... with ... a complete delight in action and existence. ... at every moment the action of the universal in the individual and the individual in the universal will be enlightened and governed by the rule of the transcendent Supernature.
... the participation and consent of the Purusha to the transition is not sufficient, there must be also the consent and participation of the Prakriti. ... There are obstinate difficulties in our being, born of its evolutionary constitution, which militate against this assent. ... mechanical habit ... needs, impulses, desires of the natural man, the old functionings of all kinds that are rooted there so deep that it would seem as if we had to dig to abysmal foundations in order to get them out; these parts refuse to give up their response to the lower law founded in the Inconscient; they continually send up to the conscious mind and life the old reactions and seek to reaffirm them there as the eternal rule of Nature. Other parts of the being are less obscure and mechanical and rooted in inconscience, but all are imperfect and attached to their imperfection and have their own obstinate reactions; the vital part is wedded to the law of self-affirmation and desire, the mind is attached to its own formed movements, and both are willingly obedient to the inferior law of the Ignorance. And yet the law of participation and the law of surrender are imperative; at each step of the transition the assent of the Purusha is needed and there must be too the consent of each part of the nature to the action of the higher power for its change. ... final complete abandonment of oneself in every part and every movement to the working of the higher Truth in the nature. ... a direct Truth-Consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. ... These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. ... full emergence of the soul and inner being ...
A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, - ... an opening up of the individual into the cosmic consciousness, - is another necessary condition for the supramental change. ... the psychic entity must be unveiled and in control. ... the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself ... the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of Overmind or Intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive.
The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding, it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: ... It is true that the conquest of the Spirit supposes the execution in one life or a few lives of a process that in the ordinary course of Nature would involve a slow and uncertain procedure of centuries or even of millenniums: ... a greater or concentrated speed does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of their successive surmounting. The increased rapidity is possible only because the conscious participation of the inner being is there ... the tardy leisureliness of Time ... a miracle with a method ... a secret all-wisdom governs everything ...
... an unfolding of higher and higher states ... a steep passage ... the delight of the divine presence ... the rupture with Nature can be decisive: ... a leap ... This change must go step by step, till the stair of ascension is transcended and there is an emergence to those greatest wide-open spaces of which the Veda speaks ...bringing in another law than that of the mental being ...
... the lower parts of the being have their own rights and, if they are to be truly transformed, they must be made to consent to their own transformation. it clings to its own ... unconsciousness ... impulsions ... reactions ... has acquired its own perverse and opposite taste, rasa, its pleasure of darkness and sorrow, its sadistic or masochistic interest in pain and suffering. ... the recalcitrant elements ... the black rock of the Inconscience. ... soul-change which emancipates mind, life, body from the snare of their own imperfections and impurities. ... the stair of ascent: there are in it many steps ... an incessant gradation ...four main ascents ...These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. ... a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge ... the substance and very grain of our being and consciousness ...are touched and penetrated and can be ...wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.
... this strenuousness of effort and labour is a sign not of strength but of weakness. As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far stronger and more truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight. ... a taking up of the lower by the higher ... this limping action of our reason is a movement of Ignorance searching for knowledge ... no need of a seeking ... This higher consciousness is a Knowledge formulating itself on a basis of self-existent all-awareness ...truth-seeing at a single view ... the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not established by logic but pre-exist ... an ever-present ... knowledge ... self-revelation ... In the end there is a great totality of truth known and experienced ... strength calls in the substance, power, motion, vibration of strength ... charges the whole being with a new and superior consciousness ...
... a power of resistance which opposes or minimises the effects of the descending Light, a resistance which may amount to a refusal, a rejection of the Light, or take the shape of an attempt to impair, subdue, ingeniously modify or adapt or perversely deform the light in order to suit it to the preconceived ideas of the Ignorance. ... resurge at the least opportunity to repossess their lost domain ... in a world of Ignorance all is achieved not only through a complexus but through a collision and struggle and intermixture of Forces. But for this highest evolution it is essential that all mixture of Ignorance with Knowledge should be abolished; and action and evolution through strife of forces must be replaced by an action and evolution through a harmony of forces ... emotions, desires, impulses, sensations, vital needs and habits of the lower Nature; these, since they are less conscious than ideas, are blinder in their response and are more obstinately self-assertive: all have the same or a greater power of resistance and recurrence, or take refuge in the circumconscient universal Nature or in our own lower levels or in a seed-state in the subconscient and from there have the power of new invasion or resurgence. This power of persistence, recurrence, resistance of established things in Nature is always the great obstacle which the evolutionary Force has to meet, which it has indeed itself created in order to prevent a too rapid transmutation even when that transmutation is its own eventual intention in things.
... a power for quietude .... if anything in the being consents to them, they can resume dominance. A previously established psychic control ... inhibits the revolt of the lower parts against the Light or their consent to the claims of the Ignorance. A preliminary spiritual transformation will also reduce the hold of the Ignorance; but neither of these influences altogether eliminates its obstruction and limitation : for these preliminary changes do not bring the integral consciousness and knowledge; the original basis of Nescience proper to the Inconscient will still be there needing at every turn to be changed, enlightened, diminished in its extent and in its force of reaction.
... The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought but by vision; thought is here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight. ... verbal thought ... can almost be described as a concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance...
A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought: it is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth ... the Illumined Mind ... throws on the physical mind a transforming light that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body.
... Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness of the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light. ... This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence.
... an invading mixture ... The infrarational "mystic", so-styled ... is often inspired by such communications on the vital level from a dark and dangerous source. ...pseudo-intuition ...
... Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light ... a sea or mass of "stable lightnings". ... a play of lightning-flashes ... To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place.
... Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, ... a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth,- these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of reason ... the pure power descending from above ... these deeper heart-perceptions ... its own greater radiant movement ... (Ch. XXVI, The Ascent towards Supermind)


Ch XXVIII THE DIVINE LIFE

... thou art born a living god from the dry tree ...
- Rig Veda
a becoming in Time, - an indivisible becoming, for our present and our future carry in themselves, transformed, made other, the past that created them ... The significance of our existence here determines our destiny: that destiny is something that already exists in us as a necessity and potentiality, the necessity of our being's secret and emergent reality, a truth of its potentialities that is being worked out ... If there is a Being that is becoming, a Reality of existence that is unrolling itself in Time, what that being, that reality secretly is what we have to become, and so to become is our life's significance.
It is consciousness and life that must be the keywords to what is being thus worked out in Time ... the essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself ... its destiny must be to evolve into its own perfection which is its true nature. Its true nature is to be wholly aware ... the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to become perfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware. This perfect and natural condition of consciousness is to us a superconscience, ... it is towards that superconscience that our conscious being must be evolving. But this evolution ... is possible only if the Inconscience which is our basis here is really itself an involved Superconscience; for what is to be in the becoming of the Reality in us must be already there involved or secret in its beginning.
If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter ... a greater consciousness means a greater life.
a growth into divine living ... But, for the full and perfect fulfilment of the evolutionary urge, this illumination and change must take up and re-create the whole being, mind, life and body: it must be not only an inner experience of the Divinity but a remoulding of both the inner and outer existence by its power; it must take form not only in the life of the individual but as a collective life of gnostic beings ...
The inner life has a supreme spiritual importance and the outer has a value only in so far as it is expressive of the inner status. ... "[Gita] he lives and moves in Me"; he dwells in the Divine ... the appearance of a new order of beings and a new earth-life must be envisaged ... Here the gnostic change assumes a primary importance ... this transmuting reversal of the whole nature. For it is a gnostic way of dynamic living that must be the fulfilled divine life on earth
But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. ... without this inwardness ... no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance, and the rest can be only its expression and outcome.
... our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances ... it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it; there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and nature.
... until we have built up in ourselves an inner life of the Spirit, it is obvious that no outer divine living can become possible. a perfected human world cannot be created by men or composed of men who are themselves imperfect. ... an outer process or formation can assist or can express soul and mind and life but cannot create or develop it. ... the growth must still come from within ...
TO BE or become something, to bring something into being is the whole labour of the force of Nature; to know, feel, do are subordinate energies ... But knowledge, thought, action, - ... cannot be the essence or object of life; they are only activities of the powers of being or the powers of its becoming, dynamic symbols of itself ... Nature's occult process is to reveal the being through the bringing out of its powers and forms, her external pressure is only a means of awakening the involved being to the need of this evolution, of this self-formation. ... to become ourselves is the one thing to be done; but the true ourselves is that which is within us, and to exceed our outer self of body, life and mind is the condition for this highest being, which is our true and divine being, to become self-revealed and active. It is only by growing within and living within that we can find it; once that is done, to create from there the spiritual or divine mind, life, body and through this instrumentation to arrive at the creation of a world which shall be the true environment of a divine living, - this is the final object that Force of Nature has set before us. This then is the first necessity, that the individual, each individual, shall discover the Spirit, the divine reality within him and express that in all his being and living. A divine life must be first and foremost an inner life; for since the outward must be the expression of what is within, there can be no divinity in the outer existence if there is not the divinisation of the inner being.
to be and to be fully is nature's aim in us; but to be fully is to be wholly conscious of one's being: unconsciousness, half consciousness or deficient consciousness is a state of being not in possession of itself; it is existence, but not fullness of being. To be aware wholly and integrally of oneself and of all the truth of one's being is the necessary condition of true possession of existence. This self-awareness is what is meant by spiritual knowledge: the essence of spiritual knowledge is an intrinsic self-existent consciousness ...
But also, since consciousness carries in itself the force of existence, to be fully is to have the intrinsic and integral force of one's being; it is to come into possession of all one's force of self and of all its use. To be merely, without possessing the force of one's being or with a half-force or deficient force of it, is a mutilated or diminished existence; it is to exist, but it is not fullness of being. It is possible, indeed, to exist only in status, with the force of being self-gathered and immobile in the self; but, even so, to be in dynamis as well as in status is the integrality of existence: power of self is the sign of the divinity of self,- a powerless spirit is no spirit. Force of being in conscious action is will ...
Lastly, to be fully is to have the full delight of being. Being without delight of being, without an entire delight of itself and all things is something neutral or diminished; it is existence, but it is not fullness of being. This delight too must be intrinsic, self-existent, automatic; it cannot be dependent on things outside itself; whatever it delights in, it makes part of itself, has the joy of it as part of its universality. All undelight, all pain and suffering are a sign of imperfection, of incompleteness: they arise from a division of being, an incompleteness of consciousness of being, an incompleteness of the force of being. To become complete in being, in consciousness of being, in force of being, in delight of being and to live in this integrated completeness is the divine living.
But again, to be fully is to be universally. ... All being is one and to be fully is to be all that is. ... to feel all selves as one's own self, to feel all delight of being as one's own delight of being is a necessary condition of the integral divine living.
... one must be also transcendentally ...
...These things are impossible without an inward living; they cannot be reached by remaining in an external consciousness turned always outwards ... The individual being has to find himself, his true existence; he can only do this by going inward, by living within and from within: for the external or outer consciousness or life separated from the inner Spirit is the field of the Ignorance; ... a few turn the eye inward and it is these who see and know ...
This movement of going inward and living inward is a difficult task to lay upon the normal consciousness of the human being; yet there is no other way of self finding.
... the introvert of this distinction also has not the inner life; he is not a seer of the true inner self and of inner things, but the small mental man who looks superficially inside himself and sees there not his spiritual self but his life-ego, his mind-ego and becomes unhealthily preoccupied with the movements of this little pitiful dwarf creature.
...a joy of being which is larger and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital man or the surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity ...
... the silence of the Spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation of it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of God; it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence.
... this inward turning and movement is not an imprisonment in personal self, it is the first step towards a true universality ...
There [surface consciousness] our very selflessness becomes more often than not a subtle form of selfishness or turns into a larger affirmation of our ego; content with our pose of altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the imposition of our individual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality, our need of ego-enlargement upon the others whom we take up into our expanded orbit.
... the gnostic being will act, not out of a surface sentiment of love and sympathy ... but out of ... this intimate oneness. ... All his action in the world will be enlightened by a truth of vision of what has to be done, a sense of the will of the Divine Reality in him which is also the Divine Reality in others, and it will be done for the Divine in others and the Divine in all ... The gnostic being finds himself not only in his own fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of the Divine Being and Will in him, but in the fulfilment of others; his universal individuality effectuates itself in the movement of the All in all beings towards its greater becoming. He sees a divine working everywhere ... There is no separative ego in him to initiate anything. ... As he does not live for a separate ego, so too he does not live for the purpose of any collective ego; he lives in and for the Divine in himself, and for the Divine in the collectivity, in and for the Divine in all beings. ... We are therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our second preoccupation ... the third desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature. This calls for the appearance not only of isolated, evolved individuals acting in the unevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of being and new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life of the gnostic individual.
... not be the gnostic divine way of collective living ... a common consciousness consolidating a common life. All will be united by the evolution of the Truth-Consciousness in them ...souls of a single Reality ... There would be a considerable free diversity between different gnostic communities ... there would be, too, a considerable free diversity in the self-expression of the individuals of a single community. But this free diversity would not be a chaos or create any discord; ... there would be a correlation and not an opposition. In a gnostic consciousness there would be no ego-insistence [but] instead the unifying sense of a common Truth in many forms : A single Consciousness-Force of which all would be aware and see themselves as its instruments would act through all and harmonise their action together. The gnostic being would feel a single consonant Force of Supernature acting in all ... he would be under no urge ... to set the power and knowledge in him against the power and knowledge of others or affirm himself as an ego striving against other egos. ... 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 ... the evolving gnostic being ... Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or collective gnostic life. ... imperfect, we cannot construct perfection ... constant recurrence of the strife of collective ego with collective ego ...
... a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life ... the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a Superconscience ... It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that Supernature - for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. ... disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a status and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater light than that of mind-nature or life-nature. ... a harmony of truth with truth [=] the native character of all gnostic seeing and action Knowledge is power and act of consciousness, Will is conscious power and conscious act of force of being; both in a gnostic being will reach greater magnitudes than any we now know, a higher degree of themselves, a richer instrumentation: for where there is an increase of consciousness, there is an increase of the potential force and the actual power of the existence. ... because the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness ... the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life ...
... the greater knowledge of the gnostic being would ... be ... the result of an evolution of consciousness and of the force of consciousness, a new dynamisation of the being. As a consequence, he would awake to and possess many things, a clear and complete knowledge of self, a direct knowledge of others, a direct knowledge of hidden forces, a direct knowledge of the occult mechanism of Mind and Life and Matter which are beyond our present attainment. This new knowledge would be based on an immediate intuitive consciousness of things and an immediate intuitive control of things; an operative insight now supernormal to us, would be the normal functioning of this consciousness ... For the gnostic being would be in unison and communion with the Consciousness-Force that is at the root of everything ... the evolving gnostic being would be more and more master of himself, master of the forces of consciousness, master of the energies of Nature, master of his instrumentation of Life and Matter. ... the evolving gnostic nature ...
A new power and powers of consciousness would be, then, an inevitable consequence of an evolution of Consciousness-Force passing beyond Mind to a superior cognitive and dynamic principle. ... a breaking down of the barriers between soul and soul ... For a total gnostic or divine living would include not only the individual life of the being but the life of others made one with the individual in a common uniting consciousness. Such a life must have for its main constituting power a spontaneous and innate, not a constructed, unity and harmony; this can only come by a greater identity of being and consciousness between individual and individual unified in their spiritual substance, feeling themselves to be self and self of one self-existence, acting in a greater unitarian force of knowledge, a greater power of the being. There must be an inner and direct mutual knowledge based upon a consciousness of oneness and identity, a consciousness of each other's being, thought, feeling, inner and outer movements, a conscious communication of mind with mind, of heart with heart, a conscious impact of life upon life, a conscious interchange of forces of being with forces of being ...
Harmony is the natural rule of the Spirit ... But in a gnostic unity in multiplicity the harmony would be there as a spontaneous expression of the unity, and this spontaneous expression presupposes a mutuality of consciousness aware of other consciousness by a direct inner contact and interchange. ...this greater life would have evolved new and superior means and powers of uniting consciousness inwardly with consciousness; intimacy of consciousness communicating inwardly and directly with consciousness ... All these new powers
An evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of consciousness ... But there would be nothing supernatural or miraculous in such an evolution, except in so far as it would be a supernature or superior nature to ours just as human nature is a supernature or superior nature to that of animal or plant or material objects. ...It is not irrational to suppose that at this much higher stage of evolution a similar but greater progression starting from these rudimentary beginnings might lead to another immense development and departure. ... An indifference to all other aims and issues is natural for the God-lover ...[for] the immature seeker ... such powers may be a great, even a deadly peril; for their supernormality may easily feed in him an abnormal exaggeration of the ego. Power ... can abase as well as elevate; nothing is more liable to misuse. But when new capacities come as an inevitable result of the growth into a greater consciousness and a greater life ... for a growth of the being into Supernature and its life in Supernature cannot take place or be complete without bringing with it a greater power of consciousness and a greater power of life ... There is nothing in this future evolution of the being which could be regarded as irrational or incredible; there is nothing in it abnormal or miraculous ... the gnostic being accepting the gnostic life would develop and use the powers of this greater consciousness, even as man develops and uses the powers of his mental nature.
It is evident that such an increase of the power or powers of consciousness would be not only normal but indispensable to a greater and more perfect life. ... [cf.] Human life with its partial harmony, in so far as that is not maintained by the imposition of [etc.] ... there is an element of struggle and discord, a mass of repressed or unfulfilled desires and frustrated wills, a simmering suppressed unsatisfaction or an awakened or eruptive discontent or unequally satisfied interests ... What is lacking is a spiritual knowledge and spiritual power, a power over self, a power born of inner unification with others, a power over the surrounding or invading world-forces, ... it is these capacities missing or defective in us that belong to the very substance of gnostic being, for they are inherent in the light and dynamis of the gnostic nature.
... Thus the law of love and sympathy is natural to our consciousness; as we grow in Spirit, its demand on us increases ... we have to move and act in a light of Truth which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done and the way to do it and intuitively and spontaneously fulfils itself in the act ...

intuitive spontaneity of their truth ... It is true that in the total terrestrial existence of which the gnostic life would be a part, there would be still continuing within it a life belonging to a less evolved order; the intuitive and gnostic life would have to fit into this total existence and carry into it as much of its own law of unity and harmony as may be possible. ... the gnostic knowledge would carry in it a perfect understanding of the consciousness of the Ignorance, and it would not be impossible, therefore, for an assured gnostic life to harmonise its existence with that of all the less developed life co-existent with it in the earth-nature.
... a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge ... It is evident that all this conflict of standards is a groping of the mental Ignorance
... find that truth and Reality and live in it ... This Reality is there within each thing ... The universe is a manifestation of the Reality ... our humanity is not the whole of the Reality or its best possible self-formation or self-expression,- the Reality has assumed before man existed an infrahuman formation and self-creation and can assume after him or in him a suprahuman formation and self-creation. The individual as spirit or being is not confined within his humanity; he has been less than human, he can become more than human. The universe finds itself through him even as he finds himself in the universe, but he is capable of becoming more than the universe, since he can surpass it and enter into something in himself and in it and beyond it that is absolute. He is not confined within the community; ... the individual is not a mere cell of the collective existence; he would not cease to exist if separated or expelled from the collective mass. ... the individual also has a being of his own which he seeks to affirm in the life of the community. But he is not tied to that, he can affirm himself in another communal life, or, if he is strong enough, in a nomad existence or in an eremite solitude where ... he can spiritually exist and find his own reality and indwelling self of being.
the individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement; for it is the individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the Reality. The movement of the collectivity is a largely subconscious mass-movement; it has to formulate and express itself through the individuals to become conscious: its general mass-consciousness is always less evolved than the consciousness of its most developed individuals, and it progresses in so far as it accepts their impress or develops what they develop. The individual does not owe his ultimate allegiance either to the State which is a machine or to the community which is a part of life and not the whole of life: his allegiance must be to the Truth, the Self, the Spirit, the Divine which is in him and in all; not to subordinate or lose himself in the mass, but to find and express that truth of being in himself and help the community and humanity in its seeking for its own truth and fullness of being must be his real object of existence. But the extent to which the power of the individual life or the spiritual Reality within it becomes operative, depends on his own development: so long as he is undeveloped, he has to subordinate in many ways his undeveloped self to whatever is greater than it. As he develops, he moves towards a spiritual freedom... The spiritually realised, the liberated man is preoccupied, says the Gita, with the good of all beings; Buddha discovering the way of Nirvana must turn back to open that way to those who are still under the delusion of their constructive instead of their real being,- or non-being ... For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,- first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being ...
The first danger is a resurgence of the old vital and material primitive barbarian in a civilised form ... it is the resurgence of the barbarian in ourselves, in civilised man, that is the peril, and this we see all around us. ... Even if this relapse is escaped, there is another danger, - for a cessation of the evolutionary urge, a crystallisation into a stable comfortable mechanised social living without ideal or outlook is another possible outcome. ... At the best he will remain arrested in some kind of mediary typal perfection, like other animal kinds, while Nature pursues her way beyond him to a greater creation.
At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. ... an unmanageable hugeness and complexity ... Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. ... This new fullness of the means of life might be, by its power for a release from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his economic and physical needs, an opportunity for the full pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the material existence, for the discovery of a higher truth and good and beauty, for the discovery of a greater and diviner spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being: but it is being used instead for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. ... All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push ... a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other ... a universalised confusion and discord out of which it is impossible to build a greater harmonic life. ... the egocentric human individuality, separative even in association ... the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces ... into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude. ... a critical choice ... if the race is to arrive or even to survive. ...
... a humanity which is missioned to evolve beyond itself, or, at any rate, if it is to live, must evolve far beyond anything that it at present is. ... competitive clash of egos ... the substitution of the communal for the individual ego. The communal ego is idealised as the soul of the nation, the race, the community; but this is a colossal and may turn out to be a fatal error. ... But this obscure collective being is not the soul or the self of the community; it is a life-force that rises from the subconscient and, if denied the light of guidance by the reason, can be driven only by dark massive forces which are powerful but dangerous for the race because they are alien to the conscious evolution of which man is the trustee and bearer. It is not in this direction that evolutionary Nature has pointed mankind; this is a reversion towards something that she had left behind her.
... It is through the growth of consciousness that the collective soul and its life can become aware of itself and develop ... the same unchanged human ego. ... Man's true way out is to discover his soul and its self-force and instrumentation and replace by it both the mechanisation of mind and the ignorance and disorder of life-nature.
[religion] does not transform the race, it cannot create a new principle of human existence. A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. ... It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.
... a radical change of nature [=] the sole possibility for the transmutation of life ... to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. ... what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. ... It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny ... What is necessary is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. That trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis in human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling that there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. To that call in the being there must always be some answer in the Divine Reality and in Nature.
the answer might, indeed, be only individual; it might result in a multiplication of spiritualised individuals, or even, conceivably though not probably, a gnostic individual or individuals isolated in the unspiritualised mass of humanity. Such isolated realised beings must either withdraw into their secret divine kingdom and guard themselves in a spiritual solitude or act from their inner light on mankind for what little can be prepared in such conditions for a happier future. The inner change can begin to take shape in a collective form only if the gnostic individual finds others who have the same kind of inner life as himself and can form with them a group with its own autonomous existence or else a separate community or order of being with its own inner law of life. It is this need of a separate life with its own rule of living adapted to the inner power or motive force of the spiritual existence and creating for it its native atmosphere that has expressed itself in the past in the formation of the monastic life or in attempts of various kinds at a new separate collective living self-governed and other in its spiritual principle than the ordinary human life. The monastic life is in its nature an association of other-worldly seekers ... But these attempts have always been overcome by the persistent inconscience and ignorance of our human vital nature; for that nature is an obstacle which no mere idealism or incomplete spiritual aspiration can change in its recalcitrant mass or permanently dominate. Either the endeavour fails by its own imperfection or it is invaded by the imperfection of the outside world and sinks from the shining height of its aspiration to something mixed and inferior on the ordinary human level. A common spiritual life meant to express the spiritual and not the mental, vital and physical being must found and maintain itself on greater values than the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human society; if it is not so founded, it will be merely the normal human society with a difference. an entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed for the new life to appear; only such a transformation of the general mind, life, body nature can bring into being a new worthwhile collective existence. The evolutionary nisus must tend not merely to create a new type of mental beings but another order of beings who have raised their whole existence from our present mentalised animality to a greater spiritual level of the earth-nature.
Any such complete transformation of the earth-life in a number of human beings could not establish itself altogether at once; even when the turning-point has been reached, the decisive line crossed, the new life in its beginnings would have to pass through a period of ordeal and arduous development. ... One might thus conceive of a number of individuals thus evolving separately in the midst of the old life and then joining together to establish the nucleus of the new existence. But it is not likely that Nature would operate in this fashion ... At a certain stage it might be necessary to follow the age-long device of the separate community, but with a double purpose, first to provide a secure atmosphere, a place and life apart, in which the consciousness of the individual might concentrate on its evolution in surroundings where all was turned and centred towards the one endeavour, and, next, when things were ready, to formulate and develop the new life in those surroundings and in this prepared spiritual atmosphere. It might be that, in such a concentration of effort, all the difficulties of the change would present themselves with a concentrated force; for each seeker, carrying in himself the possibilities but also the imperfections of a world that has to be transformed, would bring in not only his capacities but his difficulties and the oppositions of the old nature and, mixed together in the restricted circle of a small and close common life, these might assume a considerably enhanced force of obstruction which would tend to counterbalance the enhanced power and concentration of the forces making for the evolution. This is a difficulty that has broken in the past all the efforts of mental man to evolve something better and more true and harmonious than the ordinary mental and vital life. But if Nature is ready and has taken her evolutionary decision or if the power of the Spirit descending from the higher planes is sufficiently strong, the difficulty would be overcome and a first evolutionary formation or formations would be possible.
... there it can be understood that the life-interchange of gnostic individuals in a gnostic community or communities would be by its very nature an understanding and harmonious process. But here, actually, there would be a life of gnostic beings proceeding within or side by side with a life of beings in the Ignorance, attempting to emerge in it or out of it, and yet the law of the two lives would seem to be contrary and to offend against each other. a complete seclusion or separation of the life of a spiritual community from the life of the Ignorance would then seem to impose itself: for otherwise a compromise between the two lives would be necessary and with the compromise a danger of contamination or incompleteness of the greater existence; two different and incompatible principles of existence would be in contact and, even though the greater would influence the lesser, the smaller life would also have its effect on the greater, since such mutual impact is the law of all contiguity and interchange. It might even be questioned whether conflict and collision would not be the first rule of their relation, since in the life of the Ignorance there is present and active the formidable influence of those forces of Darkness, supporters of evil and violence, whose interest it is to contaminate or destroy all higher Light that enters into the human existence. An opposition and intolerance or even a persecution of all that is new or tries to rise above or break away from the established order of the human Ignorance, or if it is victorious, an intrusion of the lower forces into it, an acceptance by the world more dangerous than its opposition, and in the end, an extinction, a lowering or a contamination of the new principle of life, have been a frequent phenomenon of the past; that opposition might be still more violent and a frustration might be still more likely if a radically new light or new power were to claim the earth for its heritage. But it is to be supposed that the new and completer light would bring also a new and completer power. It might not be necessary for it to be entirely separate; it might establish itself in so many islets and from there spread through the old life, throwing out upon it its own influences and filtrations, gaining upon it, bringing to it a help and illumination which a new aspiration in mankind might after a time begin to understand and welcome.
But these are evidently problems of the transition, of the evolution before the full and victorious reversal of the manifesting Force has taken place and the life of the gnostic being becomes as much as that of the mental being an established part of the terrestrial world-order. If we suppose the gnostic consciousness to be established in the earth-life, the power and knowledge at its disposal would be much greater than the power and knowledge of mental man, and the life of a community of gnostic beings, supposing it to be separate, would be as safe against attack as the organised life of man against any attack by a lower species. But as this knowledge and the very principle of the gnostic nature would ensure a luminous unity in the common life of gnostic beings, so also it would be sufficient to ensure a dominating harmony and reconciliation between the two types of life. The influence of the supramental principle on earth would fall upon the life of the Ignorance and impose harmony on it within its limits. It is conceivable that the gnostic life would be separate, but it would surely admit within its borders as much of human life as was turned towards spirituality and in progress towards the heights ... the supramental principle in Supernature would itself determine according to the truth of things the balance of a new world-order.
... The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind's ideals and standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for humanity or for others or for the community or for the state; for he will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence. ... no conflict between the ideal of individualism and the collective ideal ... he cannot substitute mankind or the community or then State or others or himself for God ...
... the supramental gnosis will itself bring down its own truth ... Much that is normal to human life would disappear. ... It is evident that in a life governed by the gnostic consciousness war with its spirit of antagonism and enmity, its brutality, destruction and ignorant violence, political strife with its perpetual conflict, frequent oppression, dishonesties, turpitudes, selfish interests, its ignorance, ineptitude and muddle could have no ground for existence. The arts and the crafts would exist, not for any inferior mental or vital amusement, entertainment of leisure and relieving excitement or pleasure, but as expressions and means of the truth of the Spirit and the beauty and delight of existence.
... 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. ... 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 characterised 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. ... [supermanhood] this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood ... 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 supermanhood of the Nietzschean type; it might be at its worst the reign of the "blonde 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. Or it might signify the emergence of the Rakshasa or Asura out of a tense effort of humanity to surpass and transcend itself, but in the wrong direction. ... what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple; it is a self-realised being ... not an egoistic supermanhood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but ... a new consciousness ... This is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature.
This new status would indeed be a reversal of the present law of human consciousness and life, for it would reverse the whole principle of the life of the Ignorance. ... the human mind's picture of heaven is the incessant repetition of an eternal monotone. But this is a misconception; for an entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. It would be a self-creation bringing out the Infinite infinitely into form of being, and the interest of the Infinite is much greater and multitudinous as well as more imperishably delightful than the interest of the finite. The evolution in the Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifestation with more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways than any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the Infinite eternal and inexhaustible. The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.
If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the goal of development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an early or later stage of our destiny. The Self, the Spirit, the Reality that is disclosing out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter. It would return to itself, - or, if its end as an individual is to return into its Absolute, it could make that return also, - not through a frustration of life but through a spiritual completeness of itself in life. Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.

- p. 1070

The Life Divine

Published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India

It is the hope and goal that these few quotes will inspire the reader to refer to the original works

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