Discover the Spirit in Life

He says in the second chapter that the materialists and the sannyasis have both made the same mistake. They both discovered a portion of the truth and took it for the whole Reality. Both matter and spirit are the Divine and therefore, if we want Divine Life, we cannot afford to make the mistake made by either of them. We have to find where life and spirit meet. We have to discover the spirit in life, the Being within the Becoming.

The most serious question anyone can ask in life is, “Why is the world like it is? Do we really mean to say that everything here is the way that Absolute wants it to be?” He answers this in the book. There is only one determinant, only one boss, it is the Absolute. Nothing can happen without the sanction of that Absolute. There is no division between God and the Devil. Does that mean that everything is fate? No, it means that at every moment we have the freedom to make things happen as we want them to happen, because we are the power of that Absolute. If there is fate, it is the fate that we accept by believing in our own helplessness, by contending that we are not the Divine but rather separate, limited beings. By pretending that Mother does not like us or listen to us, we create our own ‘fate’. He advises us in The Life Divine not to make the mistake of thinking that we are unimportant to the Absolute. The truth is just the opposite. The Absolute is unimportant to us. We do not think about the Divine, it is the Divine who is always thinking of us and reaching out to us all the time.

We are created Divine. We may not be the form of the Divine that is there in Sachchidananda, but we are forms of the Divine. It is true that we seem to lack the characteristics associated with the Divine. But we have to understand that the Divine is trying to evolve something new. If the Divine wants to manifest itself in form and realize Sachchidananda in form, to manifest the beauty, joy, knowledge and power of that Existence in forms, then it has to become something more than the unmanifest. It has chosen to do that in such a way that the becoming is progressive. The boy child is a miniature edition of his father, but an improved edition that tries to fit into the new generation and circumstances in which he is born, not just to repeat what his father was or did in the past. The father often resents the change and wishes the boy to conform rigorously according to a standard that is no longer appropriate. The Divine is a father who is fulfilled by his child exceeding his own accomplishments, blossoming as a flower of finer fragrance as an expression of the evolutionary progress.

Why would the Divine go through this long drawn out process of millions of years to create a Supramental Being? He answers this question in a number of ways. He says, why not? The Divine enjoys this process. For the first time, Sri Aurobindo makes a clear distinction between the words, bliss and delight. The unmanifest Ananda of Being is bliss; the manifest enjoyment of Becoming is delight. The Divine has hidden itself from itself and is in the process of rediscovering itself. The delight of existence is there in every act. This is what is known as Lila in the tradition.