Chapter 10Incarnation and Evolution · Carrying on the Evolution

What is the utility of making an effort for other realisations once we have known the supreme secret (uttama ˙m rahasyam) that you are the Divine Incarnate and the Mother is the Para- Shakti? That is the highest realisation, I think, and all others — the realisation of the cosmic consciousness, of the presence of the immanent Divine, even of the silent immutable Brahman — are secondary in comparison with it. Whatever is to be done in the world will be done by you and the Mother.

Yes, but for that to be a constant realisation in its fullness the same effort has to be made and if made will bring the other realisations with it as parts of the main realisation.

30 October 1936 The supramental creation, since it is to be a creation upon earth, must be not only an inner change but a physical and external manifestation also. And it is precisely for this part of the work, the most difficult of all, that surrender is most needful; for this reason, that it is the actual descent of the supramental Divine into Matter and the working of the Divine Presence and Power there that can alone make the physical and external change possible. Even the most powerful self-assertion of human will and endeavour is impotent to bring it about; as for egoistic insistence and vital revolt, they are, so long as they last, insuperable obsta-cles to the descent. Only a calm, pure and surrendered physical consciousness, full of the psychic aspiration, can be its field; this alone can make an effective opening of the material being to the Light and Power and the supramental change a thing actual and practicable. It is for this that we are here in the body, and it is for this that you and other sadhaks are in the Asram near us. But it is not by insistence on petty demands and satisfactions in the external field or on an outer nearness pleasing to the vital nature and its pride or desire that you can get the true relation with the Divine in this province. If you want the realisation there, it is the true nearness that you must seek, the descent and presence of the Mother in your physical consciousness, her constant inner touch in the physical being and its activities, her will and knowledge behind all its work and thought and movement and the ever present Ananda of that presence expelling all vital and physical separateness, craving and desire. If you have that, then you have all the nearness you can ask for and the rest you will gladly leave to the Mother’s knowledge and will to decide. For with this in you there can be no feeling of being kept away, no sense of “gulf” and “distance”, no complaint of a unity that is lacking or an empty dryness and denial of nearness.

6 December 1930

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You have written in a letter, “A surrender by any means is good, but obviously the Impersonal is not enough, for surrender to that may be limited in result to the inner experience without any transformation of the outer being.”2 I do not understand.

It is rather surprising that you should be unable to understand such a simple and familiar statement; for that has been always the whole reason of this Yoga that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience or at the most mukti. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature. If it were not so the Mother would not be here and I would not be here — if a realisation of the Impersonal were sufficient.

15 September 1936

By what pun.ya of ours has the Grace granted to us, mere humans, this rare privilege of coming here at the Divine’s Feet?

It is the call of your soul that brought you here and also some lives.

6 May 1933

* 2 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1970), Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, vol. 23, p. 613.

What sort of bhakti in my past lives has brought me to the Mother’s feet?

The aspiration for union with the Divine and perhaps also for the descent of the Divine on the earth.

8 May 1933

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People make all sorts of effort to have God’s darshan; some even weep and weep, yet they fail to obtain it. We in the Asram don’t seem to have done very much, and yet we are here with you. What has brought this about?

There are many things that have brought it about — a connection in past lives with the Mother and myself, the development of your nature in former births which made it possible for you to seek the Divine, bhakti in those lives bearing its fruit now — finally, the Divine Grace.

October 1935

It is said that you and the Mother have been on the earth since its creation. But what have you been doing for so many millions of years in disguise? I say “disguise” because it is only now that you are showing yourselves to the world in your real nature.

Carrying on the evolution.

25 September 1935

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I fail to understand what you mean by “Carrying on the evolution.” Could you explain this more fully?

That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.

26 September 1935

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