Essence – Process – Use Value

• Sri Aurobindo calls the above essentiality, commonalty and individuality.
• The use value of an article makes itself available to us, though we do not know the process by which it is created or its essentiality.
• The discovery of the process is science, expansive research into use value is commercial or social, and the learning of the process of the essence is spiritual.
• In our own social sense, use value is external, the macro world, while the essence is of the micro unit. To discover the macro dimensions of the micro world is to come by the components of the integral knowledge.
• We term such knowledge Omniscient. Even here we stumble upon the fact that Omniscience belongs to the dimension of Time and Omnipotence to the world of space. It further explains that knowledge is inward and power, outward.
• The world of use value - that of individuality - is perhaps all the world we know. We may call it in one sense commercial and in a broader sense social. It comprises of several worlds compressed into it.
• A book comes into existence when the author writes his thoughts on paper. It is printed and sold to the whole world, which is entertained or educated by its ideas.
• When we try to split the book into paper, printing, binding, sales and so on, we expand into an endless world of technology, chemistry, work, psychology, life, existence and such different dimensions. All this is simple to understand but profound if looked at from the point of view of existence and how that existence came into being.
• The world of process is the world of science which is immense in dimensions but is equally intelligible as the world of use value.
• In the world of essence lie force, form, energy, existence, and such others which are the subjects of The Life Divine.
• Sri Aurobindo has explained every term He has used in one place or another, from what we call the first principles. To be able to know such definitions or descriptions of every word he uses makes the micro world of essence acquire the macro dimensions in our understanding.
• Such an exhaustive study and appreciation offers the perception of Infinity, if not its sensation.
• As the practical concept of Infinity has the power of luck in potential, the subtle perception of Infinity can give a spiritual sense of that plane.
• Illustrative phrases of such definitions for The Life Divine:

- Will is the force of being - page 1024.

- Cessation not into the non-existence, but into a greater existence is the superconscience of the Absolute - page 1029.

- The Inconscient is a hooded Gnosis - page 1038.

- The Transcendent being is our secret self. Our universal being is our secret depth -  page 1027.

- Unity is the dynamisation of the consciousness of the being - page 1029.

- Action is different from the energy of action. Force of being in conscious action is will. Will of Spirit is different from will of being and becoming. The force of being is perfect only when the will of being and becoming harmoniously fulfil the will of the Spirit - page 1024.

- The power of self is a sign of the divinity of self - page 1024.

- In the spiritual evolution, the occult process becomes the entire process -  page 1023.

- The soul, mind and life are the powers of being. The being itself can be made to grow if the powers of soul, mind and life are offered to us - page 1022.(What does 'the being can be made to grow' mean?)

- Mind used thought to arrive at knowledge or for action. Supermind uses thought to express the idea, not to arrive at knowledge - page 1007.(Distinguish between the two)

• This is how one reaches the first principles beyond which there is no knowledge. If knowledge is not there beyond it, what else is there? Or is there nothing?

- Sri Aurobindo has rejected from the beginning, the positions of Void, Nihil, Sunya and such others.

- We can raise one more question. How does Sat or Existence come into being? What is that process?

- Sri Aurobindo has said that it does so by Self-conception.

- If so, It is a Self which can conceive Existence into being. Sri Aurobindo says it is Maya. Maya is conceptively creative.

- What is It that can creatively conceive? What are the things it can conceive of?

- The answer is this - It or That, that can conceive of anything, and by that conception can come into existence.

- Then It is something infinitely creative.

- What does it create out of?

- Apparently It creates out of nothing or Nothing.

- It is something that can, apparently, create anything out of Nothing.

- Then it is an Infinite capable of Infinite creativity.

- Can this conception become perception or sensation?

- In the Mind this conception arises. When we transfer this to the vital, it can become Perception of infinite creativity.

• To define all terms of Sri Aurobindo from the first principles, first by exhaustively collecting such definitions from his writings or at least from The Life Divine, one can arrive at that conception of infinite creativity out of Nothing. An act can make it into Perception.
• As the slow motion picture or a microscopic vision, this subtle comprehension of ideas from the first principles opens the micro world into macro dimensions and abridges the macro version into a microcosm, planting us in the middle with the power to expand to any dimensions at any time.
• It is the Perception that reveals the Marvel of the world and a creation full of Delight and a total absence of pain or suffering.