Chapter 144414–420

415 – The Jew invented the God-fearing man; India the God-

knower and God-lover.

416 – The servant of God was born in Judaea, but he came to

maturity among the Arabs. India’s joy is in the servant-lover.

417 – Perfect love casts out fear; but still keep thou some ten-

der shadow and memory of the exile and it will make the perfection more perfect.

418 – Thy soul has not tasted God’s entire delight, if it has

never had the joy of being His enemy, opposing His designs and engaging with Him in mortal combat.

419 – If you cannot make God love you, make Him fight you.

If He will not give you the embrace of the lover, compel Him to give you the embrace of the wrestler.

420 – My soul is the captive of God, taken by Him in battle;

it still remembers the war, though so far from it, with delight and alarm and wonder.

What does Sri Aurobindo mean by “the joy of being His enemy”?

Here too I have to say that I do not know exactly, because he never told me. But I can tell you about my own experience. Until the age of about twenty-five, all I knew was the God of religions, God as men have created him, and I did not want him at any price. I denied his existence but with the certitude that if such a God did exist, I detested him. When I was about twenty-five I discovered the inner God and at the same time I learned that the God described by most Western religions is none other than the Great Adversary. When I came to India, in 1914, and became acquainted with Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, everything became very clear.

24 March 1970 421 – Most of all things on earth I hated pain till God hurt

and tortured me; then it was revealed to me that pain is only a perverse and recalcitrant shape of excessive delight.

422 – There are four stages in the pain God gives to us; when

it is only pain; when it is pain that causes pleasure; when it is pain that is pleasure; and when it is purely a fiercer form of delight.

423 – Even when one has climbed up into those levels of

bliss where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy.

424 – When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy,

I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God’s embraces.

I would like You to explain to me “the four stages of pain” which Sri Aurobindo speaks of here.

If Sri Aurobindo is speaking of moral pain, of any kind, I can say from experience that the four stages he mentions correspond to four states of consciousness which are the result of inner development and the degree of union with the divine consciousness which the individual consciousness has achieved. When the union is perfect, there only remains “a fiercer form of delight”.