THREE POWERS OF CREATION

The Divine creates and manifests itself through three powers – the power of self-conception, self-limitation and self-absorption. By self-conception, the Divine puts forth Real-Ideas or intentions that it wants to manifest. By self-limitation, the Divine concentrates on certain aspects of its infinite potential in order to project them forward, while holding back other of its powers and potentialities so as to assume the appearance of a limited formation. While the Divine is all the time Infinite and All, it projects finite aspects of itself and holds all the rest of its infinite being behind. By self-absorption, the Divine conceals its infinite consciousness within each of the limited forms of itself that it has created, so that little or no consciousness expresses on the surface of that form. By these three powers, the Infinite Consciousness manifests itself as Mind, Life and Matter.

The process of self-limitation and self-absorption can be likened to what occurs in a situation when somebody provokes me and I get very angry. At that moment I ‘forget’ that as a devotee of Mother I am supposed to always act like a civilized human being. I identify with my anger—we may even say, I become anger—and I blow up. I identify with one aspect of myself and push aside other aspects. Another time, when I am writing an essay or reading something interesting, I forget that my family is waiting for me or that I have made promises to friends. At another time when I am in a difficult situation and need some money, I think that without that money I am helpless and cannot survive. I forget all my capacities. I forget that I am a devotee of Mother. I concentrate on that one tiny thing and ignore all my other capacities.

This is similar to the process of creation that the Divine uses to limit Itself. This Infinite omniscient Being gives reality to one particular aspect and ‘forgets’ that it is all the others. Every time we concentrate on one of our limited capacities and forget all the others, we are creating the way the Divine creates. We are creating Ignorance by concentrating on a limited portion of ourselves and pushing awareness of all the rest into the background. We are burying our heads in the sand.

It may have been necessary for the Infinite to create Ignorance in order to become finite, but we are supposed to be trying to go in the other direction! If we reverse the process and concentrate on the Divine, we can rediscover the greater whole that we secretly are. That is what you do when you call Mother. You are creating through the same process, but instead of limiting yourself further, you are trying to widen yourself. You are trying to remember the Truth of what we all are, the Supramental Creator.

 Without this process of separation, the world could not exist. How can the poet create an interesting drama with only one character? You cannot have someone telling jokes to themselves and laughing. Even if we want to be devotees relating to God, we must first be devotees with egos to overcome in order to discover the psychic. That is why He says that rather than trying to relate to God, it is better to become God. Our mission is not to escape from life, but to discover and manifest the divine truth here on earth in the body, the truth that All is Brahman.