“I am the strength of the strong devoid of desire and liking,” stripped of all attachment to the phenomenal pleasure of things. “I am in beings the desire which is not contrary to their dharma.” And as for the secondary subjective becomings of Nature, bhāvāḥ (states of mind, affections of desire, movements of passion, the reactions of the senses, the limited and dual play of reason, the turns of the feeling and moral sense), which are sattwic, rajasic and tamasic, as for the working of the three gunas, they are, says the Gita, not themselves the pure action of the supreme spiritual nature, but are derivations from it; “they are verily from me,” matta eva, they have no other origin, “but I am not in them, it is they that are in me.” Here is indeed a strong and yet subtle distinction. “I am” says the Divine “the essential light, strength, desire, power, intelligence, but these derivations from them I am not in my essence, nor am I in them, yet are they all of them from me and they are all in my being.” (https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-two-natures)
And in the further chapter He also says and explains that: Thus the Gita begins by affirming that the Supreme contains all things in himself, but is not in any, matsthāni sarva-bhūtāni, “all are situated in Me, not I in them,” and yet it proceeds immediately to say, “and yet all existences are not situated in Me, my self is the bearer of all existences and it is not situated in existences.”
These statements are only in appearance inconsistent with each other. It is as the supracosmic Godhead that he is not in existences, nor even they in him; for the distinction we make between Being and becoming applies only to the manifestation in the phenomenal universe. In the supracosmic existence all is eternal Being and all, if there too there is any multiplicity, are eternal beings; nor can the spatial idea of indwelling come in, since a supracosmic absolute being is not affected by the concepts of time and space which are created here by the Lord’s Yogamaya. (https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-divine-truth-and-way)
But the Mother also says this:
The individual self and the universal self are one; in every world, in every being, in each thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man’s mission is to manifest it. (https://library.sriaurobindoashram.org/mother/cwm14/chapter/1/)
Because to say that would mean to bind Him, the Transcendent One, into time and space?
And the Presence that Mother says here, does it mean that the ‘something’ derived from Him(psychic?) is in everything and that by ‘manifesting’, does it mean developing the psychic to realizing Him in all three modes and then fulfilling the purpose of that portion/aspect of Him?
In the talk, you had given the example of the author not being in the book, but the book having been derived from something of the author..in this case, what could be the further growth of the author’s ‘something’ in the book that has already come into existence? Or maybe I am misquoting it in a different context?
Sorry I don’t know if I have been able to express the question to make sense, but would you mind helping to reconcile these two truths uttered by the Lord and the Mother to make me understand better. Thank you so much.
Gratitude
Here is the understanding provided by Sri Aurobindo himself.
‘But what again is meant by saying that the Divine is not in the becomings, the forms and affections of the lower nature, even the sattwic, though they all are in his being? In a sense he must evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist. But what is meant is that the true and supreme spiritual nature of the Divine is not imprisoned there; they are only phenomena in his being created out of it by the action of the ego and the ignorance. The ignorance presents everything to us in an inverted vision and at least a partially falsified experience. We imagine that the soul is in the body, almost a result and derivation from the body; even we so feel it: but it is the body that is in the soul and a result and derivation from the soul. We think of the spirit as a small part of us—the Purusha who is no bigger than the thumb—in this great mass of material and mental phenomena: in reality, the latter for all its imposing appearance is a very small thing in the infinity of the being of the spirit.’
It is a distinction of crucial importance in the sense that if the Divine is in everything and all is the result of His Will then what is the meaning of choices, or of turning towards the Divine, or of pursuing the Yoga at all? Here the Gita makes us understand the truth of the double self and the double nature, lower and higher, as well as the distinction between the Divine Essence which is everywhere, in everything and the manifestation. Let’s take a few examples.
What shall we say about our body? I am in the fingers or the fingers are mine? Shall we say, I am in my anger or the anger rises within me? In a sense I do flow in the anger but I can’t say that I am in the anger. So too, the Divine is in everything but as the essence, as our true Self that is one with the universal Self, untouched by all the distortions of the ego-self and the desire-self even though, there too, in the lower self and the lower nature, it is something of Him, something of His Power that supports it. We can take another example. Am I in my reflection in the broken mirror? Well essentially it is me but it is equally true that it is something very limited and captures a small, distorted truth of who I am. That is where the example of the book comes in. Vyasa is all over the Mahabharata. And yet will it be accurate to say that Vyasa is in Dushasana and therefore there is no difference between the two!
In a similar vein we can say that the Divine is ‘sort of in us’ and yet ‘not in us’. He is in us as our truth, true Self and yet it would be a mistake to say that He is in this little ego-formation that I call myself. This distinction is important because otherwise we may end up saying and doing all kinds of things under the pretext that it is not me but He who is doing it since He is the sole doer.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
