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PART
FOUR
The Divine Man THE core of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the
central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine
Descent-Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon
earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter
rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This is a truth, a fact of creation – giving
the whole clue to the riddle of this world – that has not been envisaged at all
in the past or otherwise overlooked and not given the value and importance that
it has. Poets and seers, sages and saints along with common men from the very
birth of humanity have mourned this vale of tears, this sorrowful transient
earthly life, anityam asukham lokam imam¹, into which they have been thrown:
they have wished and willed and endeavoured to change or reform or re-create
it, but have always failed, and in the end, finding it ultimately incorrigible,
concluded that escape was the only solution, the only issue, either like the sage
going out into Nirvana, spiritual dissolution, or like the atheist stoically
going down with a crumbling world into a material disintegration. The truth of
the matter is, however, different as Sri Aurobindo sees it. The spectacle is
not so gloomy and irremediable. The world has a future and man has hope. The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has
¹ The Gita, IX. 33
Page-125 veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken
up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable felicity in pain and
suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And
thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit,
because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and
transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the
spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy
imbedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward drive of evolution
that brings out gradually, step by step, the various modes of the
consciousness in different degrees and potentials till the original summit is
revealed. But there is a still closer mystery, the
mystery of mysteries. There has not been merely a general descent, the descent
of a world-force on a higher plane into another world-force on a lower plane;
but that there is the descent of the individual, the personal Godhead into and
as an earthly human being. The Divine born as a man and leading the life of a
man among us and as one of us, the secret of Divine Incarnation is the supreme
secret. That is the mechanism adopted by the Divine to cure and transmute human
ills – himself becoming a man, taking upon himself the burden of the evil that
vitiates and withers life and working it out in and through himself. Something
of this truth has been caught in the Christian view of Incarnation. God sent
upon earth his only begotten son to take upon himself the sins of man, suffer
vicariously for him, pay the ransom and thus liberate him, so that he may reach
salvation, procure his seat by the side of the Father in Heaven. Man corrupted
as he is by an original sin cannot hope by his .own merit to achieve salvation.
He can only admit his sin and repent and wait for the Grace to save him. The
Indian view of Incarnation laid more stress upon the positive aspect of the
matter, viz, the role of the Incarnation as the inaugurator and establisher of
a new order in life –
dharmasamsthapanarthaya. The Avatar brings down and embodies a higher principle
of human organisation, a greater consciousness which he infuses into the
existing pattern, individual or collective, which has -served its purpose, has
become otiose and time-barred and needs to be remodelled, has been at the most
preparatory to
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The Avatar means a new
revelation and the uplift of the human consciousness into a higher mode of
being. The physical form he takes signifies the physical pressure that is
exerted for the corroboration and fixation of the inner illumination that he
brings upon earth and in the human frame. The Indian tradition has focussed its
attention upon the Good sreyas – and
did not consider it essential to dwell upon the Evil. For one who finds and sees
the Good always and everywhere, the Evil does not exist. Sri Aurobindo lays
equal emphasis on both the aspects. Naturally, however, he does not believe in
an original evil, incurable upon earth and in earthly life. In conformity with
the ancient Indian teaching he declares the original divinity of man: it is
because man is potentially and essentially divine that he can become actually
and wholly divine. The Bible speaks indeed of man becoming perfect even as the
Father in Heaven is perfect: but that is due exclusively to the Grace showered
upon man, not because of any inherent perfection in him. But in according full
divinity to man, Sri Aurobindo does not minimise the part of the undivine in
him. This does not mean any kind of Manicheism: for Evil, according to Sri
Aurobindo, is not coeval or coterminous with the Divine, it is a later or
derivative formation under given conditions, although within the range and
sphere of the infinite Divine. Evil exists as a stern reality; even though it
may be temporary and does not touch the essential reality, it is not an
illusion nor can it be ignored, brushed aside or bypassed as something
superficial or momentary and of no importance. It has its value, its function
and implication. It is real, but it is not irremediable. It is contrary to the
Divine but not contradictory. For even the Evil in its inmost substance carries
or is the reality which it opposes or denies outwardly. Did not the very first
of the apostles of Christ deny his master at the crucial moment? As we have
said, evil is a formation necessitated by certain circumstances, the
circumstances changed, the whole disposition as at present constituted changes
automatically and fundamentally. The
Divine then descends into the earth-frame, not merely as an immanent and hidden
essence – sarvabhutantaratma-but
as an individual person embodying that essence – manusim tanum asritam. Man
too, however earthly and impure he may
Page – 127 be, is essentially the Divine himself,
carries in him the spark of the supreme consciousness that he is in his true
and highest reality. That is how in him is bridged the gulf that apparently
exists between the mortal and the immortal, the Infinite and the Finite, the
Eternal and the Momentary, and the Divine too can come into him and become, so
to say, his lower self. The individual or personal Divine leaves his
home of all bliss – Vaikuntha – forgets himself and enters into this world of
all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he
encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and
substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and
transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and
suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary
human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in
spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his
psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity.
This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside
each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when
viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation,
its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the
gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements
on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into
the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed
of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience. The Divine descends as an individual person
fundamentally to hasten the evolutionary process and to complete it; he takes
the human form to raise humanity to divinity. The fact and the nature of the
process have been well exemplified in Sri Ramakrishna who, it is said, took up
successively different lines of spiritual discipline and by a supreme and
sovereign force of concentration achieved realisation in each line in the
course of a few days what might take in normal circumstances years or even
lives to do. The Divine gathers and concentrates in himself the world-force,
the Nature-Energy – even like a Page – 128 dynamo – and focuses and canalises it to give
it its full, integral and absolute effectivity. And mortal pain he accepts, and
swallows the poison of ignorant life – even like Nilakantha Shiva – to
transmute it into ecstasy and immortality. The Divine Mother sank into the
earth-nature of a human body: Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword. . . Hoping her greater being to implant That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.¹ But this is God's share – la part de Dieu; for man too as man has to do
his part. Because the Divine descending and accomplishing the work does not
mean either of two things: first, it does not mean that it is a sudden miracle,
deus ex machina, a fiat from the heaven which upsets and bears down everything
before it and practically has no relation, logical or causal with what precedes
and what follows. It is, on the contrary, as we have said, the culmination of a
long process, the seal of fulfilment set upon a steady preparation and
travailing growth. The Divine descends when the time is ripe, that is to say,
when forces and instruments have been developed, refined, sharpened and
tempered, so that they can harness and wield the Power from above. But for the
preparation, the necessary conditions being there, the Grace would not have descended,
although it is also true that but for the Grace, the culmination and the utter
fulfilment would not have come about – there would have been only a vicious
circle or an unending seesaw. Next, the Descent does not mean 'either that
following upon it the whole business is done and completed automatically and
immediately or nothing is left to be done any more. Not so. It means that what
has been so long practically beyond reach, towards which one had to move with
uncertainty and vague effort and in a roundabout way, as though through a
trackless virgin forest or across an uncharted sea, has now been brought nearer
and closer to human grasp, is now made part and parcel of earth's familiar
atmosphere, so that any human being who genuinely aspires and looks for it can
find it about him: there is just a thin veil which has to be put aside a
little, ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book J, Canto I
Page – 129 into which a little opening is to be made and
one comes in contact with or even enters into what one seeks. This means that
the Grace has leaned down to man, but man too has at least to stretch his arms
to touch and embrace it. Furthermore, to make that Grace permanently active and
real in the normal consciousness, one has to labour, work out in fact what is
given potentially: the seed is planted for him, it will grow and bloom and
come to fruition provided necessary care and attention are given to the soil
that bears it. Thus then the embodied human person who has
the embodied Divine Person before his eyes must know how to instal and
incorporate the Divine Person in him, in his body and physical existence. That
was perhaps the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of
transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in
represent – are or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics
assert – the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in
flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in
stone, grain by grain, of a living body – organic elements eliminated and
replaced by the inorganic in the very atomic structure and constitution – even
so, the living human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will
be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the
infusion and imposition of the Divine figure. The Christian mystics themselves, however, do
not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiation-although that might
have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the
perfection sought by them was to be enjoyed in Heaven in company of the Father
and not on this earth and in this human body: it was more a sublimation than a
transformation that was their goal. The flesh for them was always too weak.
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