Chapter 1

The Crowning Realisation of this Yoga

Words of Sri Aurobindo

…the crowning realisation of this yoga is when you become aware of the whole world as the expression, play or Lila of an infinite divine personality, when you see in all, not the impersonal Sad Atman which is the basis of manifest existence, – although you do not lose that knowledge, – but Sri Krishna who at once is, bases and transcends all manifest and unmanifest existence, avyakto ’vyaktat parah. For behind the Sad Atman is the silence of the Asat which the Buddhist Nihilists realised as the sunyam and beyond that silence is the Paratpara Purusha (puruso varenya adityavarnas tamasah parastat). It is he who has made this world out of his being and is immanent in and sustains it as the infinite-finite Ishwara, ananta and santa, Shiva and Narayana, Sri Krishna the Lilamaya who draws all of us to him by his love, compels all of us by his masteries and plays his eternal play of joy and strength and beauty in the manifold world.

The world is only a play of his being, knowledge and delight, sat, cit and ananda. Matter itself, you will one day realise, is not material, it is not substance but form of consciousness, guna, the result of quality of being perceived by sense-knowledge. Solidity itself is only a combination of the gunas, samhati and dhrti, cohesion and permanence, a state of conscious being, nothing else. Matter, life, mind and what is beyond mind, it is all Sri Krishna the Ananta-guna Brahman playing in the world as the Sachchidananda. When we have this realisation, when we dwell in it securely and permanently, all possibilities of grief and sin, fear, delusion, internal strife and pain are driven puissantly from our being.