Chapter 4

The First Expression of Love and the Summit of Its Ascent

Words of the Mother

It has been said that the tiger’s need for devouring is one of the first expressions of love in the world. I think that long before the tiger, there must have been primitive creatures in the depths of the sea which had only this one function: a stomach. They existed only as stomachs. And so they swallowed – that was their one occupation. Evidently that was one of the first results of the Power of Love infiltrating into Matter, for before this there was nothing: there was perfect inconscience, complete immobility, nothing stirred. With Love movement began: the awakening of consciousness and the movement of transformation. Well, the first forms, it may be said, were the first expression of Love in Matter. So we can go from the need of swallowing which is the only consciousness – a need of swallowing, of uniting – right up to… Excuse me, we say that Love is the power of the world – it is a primitive way of uniting with things, but it is a very direct way: one swallows and absorbs the thing; well, the tiger indeed takes a great joy in it. So there is a joy already, it is already quite a high form of love. You may go higher and end up with one of the highest expressions of love in human beings: the total self-giving to what is loved, that is, to die for one’s country or to give one’s life to defend somebody, and things like that. That indeed is already… fairly high. It is still mixed with some mud. It is not the highest form but it is already something. And you see all the steps, don’t you? Well, from this one has still to climb a good deal to reach the true expression, to reach what I have described, which is at the summit of the ascent – I would not like to travesty my own words (Mother takes her copy of “The Four Austerities” and reads:)

“Love is, in its essence, the joy of identity; it finds its expression in the bliss of union.”

At first, before the emanation of love, there is something which we may express very clumsily by “the joy of identity”. That indeed is very difficult to conceive, for human thought cannot conceive of things except by their opposites, while the final stage is when love has gone full circle in the universe in order to go back to its origin; then it has the result of all that experience it gained and it returns to its starting-point. It goes back to its starting-point with something more which it did not have before starting: the experience of the universe. And fundamentally, that is the very raison d’etre of creation. It is because the consciousness would not be what it is if it had not expressed itself in a creation. Well, the return from creation – which, mark it, is not something that takes place in time – is very difficult to conceive, for we conceive time and space and for us things are successive, one thing follows another, but if it were possible to conceive a total movement which would englobe everything and be at once the beginning and the end, and which would contain everything, well, this return, which would not be a return in time, which would be a return in consciousness – how shall I explain that to you? – the return of love to its origin, instead of being simply the joy of identity, becomes the ecstasy of union – and obviously, if one sees from the pure psychological point of view, there is an enriching of consciousness which comes from the experience gained in the universe; that is, there is a richness of content and a plenitude of consciousness which would not be there if there had been no manifested universe. And that obviously is the most logical explanation, the most logical reason for the creation.

Words of the Mother

…if the world, if creation realised its perfect identity with the Divine, there would no longer be any creation. If you realise this perfect identity in which there is no longer any possibility of distinction and if the entire universe realised this perfect identity in which there is no longer any possibility of distinction, well, there would no longer be any universe. It would be a return to Pralaya.

So the solution is to find Ananda, even in the play, in this exchange in which one both gives and receives, in which one seems to be two; and that is why they keep the duality.

Otherwise, in identity, nothing remains but the identity. If the identity is complete and perfect, there is no more objectivisation.

But I said this somewhere when speaking about the story of love. I think nobody – oh! I don’t know – probably very few people noticed the distinction. I said that it begins with the Ananda of identity, and that after the full circuit of the creation, it ends in the Ananda of union.¹ Well, if there had been no circuit, there would never be the Ananda of union, there would only be the Ananda of identity. Were there no circuit, there would be no union.

This is perhaps a little subtle, but it is a fact: and perhaps it is just in order that the Ananda of identity may find what I might call its consummation and crowning in the Ananda of union, that the whole circuit was made.

But if there is perfect identity, there can be no union, the feeling of union does not exist, for it necessarily implies something other than perfect identity. There can be perfect union but there is no perfect identity.

Don’t try to understand with words and with your head, for these two words express altogether different experiences. And yet the result is the same, but one is rich with all that was not in the other, the richness of the whole experience – the whole universal experience.

Words of Sri Aurobindo

According to our own philosophy the whole world came out of ananda and returns into ananda, and the triple term in which ananda may be stated is Joy, Love, Beauty. To see divine beauty in the whole world, man, life, nature, to love that which we have seen and to have pure unalloyed bliss in that love and that beauty is the appointed road by which mankind as a race must climb to God.